Introduction

To most of us, the concept of ‘owning the past’ may seem odd. Shouldn’t the past just be what happened? What is there to own? The past is a series of events, or a set of stories, or a collection of artifacts from past cultures, or all of the above. While documents and artifacts can perhaps be owned, in what sense can the past be owned? And if the past can be owned, why is it an issue? Doesn’t it belong to everyone?

For a very long time, archaeologists did not even consider the concept of ownership of the past - from their perspective, the past belonged to everyone. Indeed, most archaeologists would still argue this is true. They see themselves as agents who discover the past and open it or lay it out for present and future generations. Historians find manuscripts and written materials that have been long forgotten or left uninterpreted, and archaeologists find material evidence that has left no written record. Sometimes, in the case of historical archaeology, archaeologists can weave together the written and unwritten past. For the most part, people have been pleased to know about the past as presented by archaeologists, and the professions of history and archaeology have been considered honorable ones.

In the late 1970s, this view of history and archaeology as honorable or benign began to change. Some linked archaeology and history to colonialism and/or scientific imperialism, and a case can be made that archaeological data and interpretations have been used by some to justify colonial and imperial behaviors. It is also true that scholars did not always carefully consider and try to address some of the inherent biases in their data. In addition, archaeologists and other kinds of anthropologists have not always kept the people they studied foremost in their research; on occasion, although they acted within the norms of the particular time, their actions, when viewed through today’s norms, might appear ethically questionable. To put it simply, scholars in the past did not often consider the biases of their data, and they did not often consider or incorporate the perspectives of native peoples (see Native Peoples and Archaeology) into their interpretations.