Overview
- Includes specific case studies to help the researcher and student to identify and clarify the links between abstract ethical values and the painfully real ethical dilemmas that archaeologists are forced to confront in conflict zones
- Covers a number of issues that have captured media attention in recent years, including the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq and Afghanistan, the entanglement of heritage and conflict in Israel, Palestine and the ancient Yugoslavia
- Addresses the subjectivity of ethics in conflict archaeology by utilizing "debate" formats in several of the chapters
Part of the book series: Ethical Archaeologies: The Politics of Social Justice (ETHARCHAEOL, volume 2)
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Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- archaeology and conflict and the Middle East
- archaeology, violence, and ethics
- conflict archaeology and ethics
- conflict archaeology and politics
- conflict archaeology in Yugoslavia
- conflict zones and archaeology
- cultural heritage crime and ethics
- heritage of conflict zones
- illegal trade in antiquities in conflict zones
- refugee archaeologists
About this book
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.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
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 andantiquarian Thomas Joseph Pettigrew.
Alfredo González-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).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence
Editors: Alfredo González-Ruibal, Gabriel Moshenska
Series Title: Ethical Archaeologies: The Politics of Social Justice
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1643-6
Publisher: Springer New York, NY
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4939-1642-9Published: 11 November 2014
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4939-3731-8Published: 25 February 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4939-1643-6Published: 10 November 2014
Series ISSN: 2730-6925
Series E-ISSN: 2730-6933
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 243
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 13 illustrations in colour
Topics: Archaeology, Ethics