There are two counter tendencies in archaeology right now. The pull at each other but not so much from ethical concerns but because of epistemological consequences of their fields of work. This may not seem extraordinary as these types of theoretical disputes happen in all mature disciplines and are the process of skirmishes in paradigm shifts. Yet the cause of this rift stems from ‘external’, societal pressures imposed upon archaeology. This would seem to involve the discipline in a consideration of its operating ethics. As a practice assembling the things of the past in a manner relevant to a sensibility at large in society (Shanks 2001), archaeology would seem beholden to ethical considerations. However, excavating beneath this society-ethics relation rests a more serious inheritance of modernist thought: epistemology.
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