Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence

This volume examines the distinctive and highly problematic ethical questions surrounding conflict archaeology. By bringing together sophisticated analyses and pertinent case studies from around the world it aims to address the problems facing archaeologists working in areas of violent conflict, past and present. Of all the contentious issues within archaeology and heritage, the study of conflict and work within conflict zones are undoubtedly the most highly charged and hotly debated, both within and outside the discipline. Ranging across the conflict zones of the world past and present, this book attempts to raise the level of these often fractious debates by locating them within ethical frameworks. The issues and debates in this book range across a range of ethical models, including deontological, teleological and virtue ethics. The chapters address real-world ethical conundrums that confront archaeologists in a diversity of countries, including Israel/Palestine, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Rwanda, Germany and Spain. They all have in common recent, traumatic experiences of war and dictatorship. The chapters provide carefully argued, thought-provoking analyses and examples that will be of real practical use to archaeologists in formulating and addressing ethical dilemmas in a confident and constructive manner.

Gabriel Moshenska is Lecturer in Public Archaeology at UCL, where he coordinates the MA in Public Archaeology and teaches the archaeology of modern conflict. He has a PhD in the archaeology, material culture and memory of the Second World War. His research interests are wide-ranging in the extreme. He has published studies of children and material culture; the history of Egyptian mummy unwrappings in nineteenth century Britain; Mortimer Wheeler’s philosophy and practice of public archaeology; gas masks; archaeological ghost stories; air warfare and commemoration; the ethics of burial archaeology; Rudyard Kipling; the economics of archaeology; the archaeology of internment and imprisonment; alternative or ‘fringe’ archaeologies; ‘absent’ heritage; community archaeology; cultural memory; the archaeology of air raid shelters; and the contested reception of Milton’s theological writings in the early nineteenth century. He is currently working on a biography of the surgeon and antiquarian Thomas Joseph Pettigrew.

Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal is a staff scientist at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He holds a PhD in Prehistoric Archaeology from the Complutense University of Madrid. His research focuses on the archaeology of the contemporary past and material culture. He has traced the destructive operations of modernity (war, dictatorship, colonialism and predatory capitalism) through the archaeological record in Spain, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea and Brazil. He has also investigated the role of material culture in resisting modernity and the state. An outcome of this latter work is An archaeology of resistance: time and materiality in an African borderland (forthcoming), based on a long-running project in Ethiopia. His research on the contemporary past has been published in major journals (Current Anthropology, Antiquity, World Archaeology). He has recently completed a project on the archaeological remains of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. He is co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (Equinox Press) and of the volume Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the tropes of modernity (Routledge, 2013).