Ethics and In-situ Science

Summary

The process of archaeological excavation is in itself destructive and excavators can and do cause irreparable damage and the demolition of site context. Archaeological ethics reacts to protect artefacts and sites that are in danger of destruction or loss. The desire to protect cultural heritage causes many ethical theorists to suggest that artefacts must not be recovered at all from their contexts. However to allow the find to remain in the ground opens it up to theft, destruction and loss just as much as the successful retrieval and cataloguing of the artefact. The simple answer is the retention of artefacts by local guardians of history and the supervised study of the archaeological record by scientific methods that do not cause the destruction or degradation of said artefacts. This paper discusses the nuances of in-situ scientific study as it relates to such fieldwork-friendly instruments as the PXRF, whose genesis have allowed the lab to travel to the artefact and has greatly reduced the danger to artefacts and increased the power of local Archaeological societies but allowing them to retain their local heritage.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Photons in the Field: New Approaches to the Use of Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) in Archaeological Fieldwork   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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