In recent years, whether out of choice or necessity, archaeologists have paid increasing attention to certain ethics that they share with other professionals - scientists, engineers, teachers, cooks - and with society as a whole. It is unethical to plagiarize, of course, or to steal a colleague’s or student’s work. We have ethical responsibilities toward those who work with and for us. We should not exploit or abuse them; we should provide a living wage, decent living conditions, and reasonably safe workplaces. Less obviously, most of us recognize an obligation to help those we supervise learn from what they do, regardless of whether they are formally regarded as students. Particularly, those who work without or with little pay generally do so because they are interested in archaeology, and we are obligated to help them satisfy that interest.
We have ethical duties to those who pay the bills, be they institutional employers, sponsor foundations or individuals, government agencies, or contractual clients. At the very least, we owe our employers and sponsors an honest day’s work and a product as close as possible to whatever it is they expect us to deliver. Beyond this, most of us recognize an obligation to be sensitive to the interests that have brought them to finance our work - for example, the interest of a property developer required to fund an archaeological study before his or her development destroys a site, whose great desire is probably that we complete our work promptly and get out of the way.
We have ethical responsibilities toward the world around us, and to its nonarchaeological resources. Those of us who work in environmental assessment and similar fields often find ourselves assigned responsibility for describing and evaluating aspects of the environment that are not archaeological - historic buildings, cultural landscapes, the traditional lifeways of local people. We have a duty to recognize that these places and things have value even though they may not be of archaeological interest. If we cannot ourselves represent that value adequately, we have a duty to make sure it is addressed by people better qualified to do so than we. All of us are responsible for taking care of the natural and human environments within which we work - for not polluting a stream with dirt from our excavations, not digging up the habitat of an endangered species, and not undermining the historic building that stands on our excavation site.
Among these external ethical precepts, one of the most interesting and problematical is the notion of responsibility to those who pay the bills. Recognizing and carrying out this responsibility is seldom a problem when the one doing the paying is one’s own museum or university, or a foundation that supplies research grants. We may be late with a report; we may not find what we and our supporters had hoped we would find, we may misspend our grant and flee the country, but these tend to be either minor problems or such obvious ethical failures that they raise few problems of interpretation. The ethic of ‘responsibility to financial supporters’ becomes complicated when the financial supporter’s only interest is in getting the archaeology out of the way so he can proceed with his housing project or highway.
Archaeologists today are routinely employed as members of teams doing environmental impact assessments in advance of construction and land use projects. In this context one’s financial support often comes from the party whose potential environmental impacts one is assessing. What are one’s responsibilities toward the financial supporter - the client - in such a case?
It is easy to say that our responsibility is simply to do proper, honest archaeology - to ascertain what impacts the proposed project will have on archaeological sites and seek ways to preserve them. But the matter is not that simple. For one thing, there are many different ways to consider impacts. Will we seek only those sites that will be bulldozed to oblivion if the project is built, or will we also look for those that may be indirectly affected, by future erosion downstream, through looting by residents of the new housing project, through secondary development induced by the presence of the new motorway? When we find a site, we can evaluate its significance in a variety of different ways - some narrow and more or less dismissive, others much broader and more inclusive. Which sort of evaluation scheme should we employ? As individuals and teams we may or may not individually be particularly well qualified to find or evaluate particular kinds of sites, in particular areas, but obtaining specialist advice may be costly to our client. Then there are the nonarchaeological interests - the descendant community that thinks a place is terribly important even though we, as archaeologists, find nothing interesting about it; the religious group that ascribes spiritual significance to a place, the architectural historians who want to save old buildings and the community members who want to save their town. Doing proper archaeology may technically not include paying any attention whatever to such interests, and whether we do pay attention or not can have financial implications for our employer. It is safe to assume in most cases that the client would like us to do as little and find as little as possible - to look only at areas where direct destructive project impacts will occur, to evaluate sites as narrowly as possible, and to assign value solely on the basis of archaeological criteria, let other interests fend for themselves. Is it our ethical obligation to do our work in accordance with our client’s program and preference, or is this directly contrary to our other ethical responsibilities? Here again it is easy to say we should be broad, inclusive, and thorough in our study of a project’s impacts, and provide the client with objective, unbiased information whether he wants it or not. But just how broad an area or range of impacts should we consider? What range of interests should we include in our consideration? What is our definition of ‘thorough’ in the case at hand - or for that matter, our definition of ‘objective’ and ‘unbiased’? And what do we do when our team leader says, or implies, that we are being unreasonable, costing the client unnecessary money, not giving him the results he wants, and that we may lose our jobs or our next contract as a result? On the other hand, at what point does the ‘thoroughness’ of our research become exploitative of our client? These can be difficult questions, and archaeologists increasingly must grapple with them as we play our roles in the activities of government agencies, land developers, project proponents, and public-interest groups.
World History
