This dissertation assesses the ethical and epistemological crisis in archaeology posed by cultural heritage. Cultural heritage forms the fulcrum for a variety of interests in the past and present. A resource mobilized for identity construction on the nationalist, diasporic, or purely personal scale, it is also increasingly being framed within international and universal interests appropriate to an inter-connected, mobile and globalized world context. As a purveyor of the past, the discipline of archaeology would seem to be bolstered by such concerns with a global past. Nevertheless, these very engagements with a broadening range of interests and uses of the global past pose fundamental questions for the discipline of archaeology.

Primary among these has been the interest of indigenous groups to legally mandate the right to interpret the past within non-Western, non-Scientific frameworks of understanding that are the mainstay of the discipline. This legal imposition is resulting in a controversy between ethics and epistemology that increasingly fragments archaeology into separate intellectual communities. The divisive crux: how to balance the ethical imperative to incorporate non-archaeological interests without compromising an ‘objective’ rendering of the past.

The principal goals of this dissertation are to (1) rethink this dichotomy between archaeological and non-archaeological frameworks for understanding the past by turning reflexive attention to the epistemologies that structure both forms of engagement and (2) articulating a notion of ‘mediation’ as a new methodology in archaeology for manifesting all interests in the material past through new digital media allowing for open participation in archaeological interpretation.

To this end, I focus upon the UNESCO (United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage site of Teotihuacán in central Mexico. Located near Mexico City, the monumentality and accessibility of its ruins guarantee Teotihuacán’s involvement with political movements of the Mexican nation-state, international tourism and the development of archaeological practice. Tthe initial modern excavations at Teotihuacán (in 1917) were intended to link the site with the history of the Mexican people and to provide an exemplar of the capacity of indigenous achievement. As the most visited archaeological site in Mexico, this message finds a large audience (see INAH's heritage plan [link]). Such public and archaeological interest has resulted in a long historical precedent at Teotihuacán where international, national and indigenous appropriation of the site for discrepant interests abuts with archaeological research. Currently exacerbated by the contested construction of a Wal-Mart (see 'TeotihuaWalmart') within the archaeological zone (for one of the contentious discussions [link], and see the Mexican gov.'s statement [link]), these self-same interests make Teotihuacán the optimal fieldwork location for my project. Having participated in both ethnographic research in the surrounding pueblos and archaeological excavations within the site over the summers of 2002, 2003 and 2004, I will utilize opinions expressed by both archaeologists and non-archaeologists as the primary data in addressing the principal goals of my project.

The dissertation is divided into four sections comprised of six chapters: conceptual framework, history, methods, and case studies/experiments. In Chapter One, ‘The Case for Mediation in Archaeology’, I set the theoretical stage for my project by arguing for a program of ‘mediation’ as the reflective usage of media in presenting both archaeological and non-archaeological understandings of the material past. I begin by suggesting the correlation of this program with two foci of recent archaeological thinking: (1) the legalistic mediation of alternate engagements with the past as part of a democratization of ‘voices’ within stakeholder groups in what can broadly be taken as ‘multivocal’ archaeology; and (2) the increasing attention to new technological mediation as enabling diverse engagements with the material past. For example, I utilize an on-line forum (footnote 2) that enables open-editing by the site’s community members to post images and textual commentary pertaining to a non-archaeological significance of Teotihuacán. Such knowledge is routinely missed in traditional archaeological discourse. But beyond the semantic derivation, I propose a ‘mediational archaeology’ that underscores the active role of both types of mediation in shaping understandings of the past and integrates the strengths of both areas of research into a unified program, thereby avoiding the current ethics-epistemology dilemma.

In Chapter Two, I present ‘The Historical and Archaeological Background of Teotihuacán in Mexico’. Moving through the subsections of ‘Historical Antecedents: New Spain and 'the Indian Past’’, ‘Criollo Patriotism and 'the Mexican Past'’, ‘Independence and Popularization/Expropriation of Mexico's Past’, ‘Post-Revolution and Scientific Archaeology’ and ‘On-going Excavations at Teotihuacán,’ I am able to demonstrate the historical suitability and need of a mediational archaeology at Teotihuacán.

Chapter Three, ‘Mediational Techniques: theory-practice at Teotihuacán’, addresses how to employ new digital media at the site, the technicalities of how such practice facilitates the incorporation of alternate frameworks for understanding the site, and anticipates the examples of collaborative social software and wiki-databasing presented in Chapter Five. As my primary data for these new techniques, I couple Chapter Four, ‘Questionnaire/Interview Results: presenting multiple frameworks for knowledge constitution at Teotihuacán’, to this methodological background in order to present the results of my social data collection and justify their statistical robustness. The collocation of questionnaire results in this chapter will allow me to quantify the various opinions regarding the site and factors structuring differential interpretation.

As mentioned, Chapter Five, ‘The Process of the Project: a dynamic rendering of a Teotihuacán excavation with wiki-databasing and collaborative authoring’, will constitute my case-study/experiment. Appropriately, the entirety of this ‘chapter’ will be on-line (footnote 2). However, a CD-Rom will be included with the dissertation, as well as a ‘ghost-text’, or text pages containing ‘Grab’ images of principal on-line pages with their interconnections (links) highlighted to serve as a ‘place-holder’ and tag this hyper-media component in the textual dissertation itself.

I conclude my theoretical argument and present the significance of the project in Chapter Six, ‘Structural Reflexivity as a Model for Knowledge Constitution at Teotihuacán’. Reiterating the current dilemma between ethics and epistemology in the discipline of archaeology, I argue that ethical principles are inextricably bound-up with more thorough-going epistemologies, and that the two issues cannot, in fact, be polarized (or polarizing). To bypass the current dilemma, I focus attention on the structuring relations, such as economic positioning, exposure to archaeological literature, involvement with site, etc., that generate coherent archaeological and non-archaeological frameworks for understanding Teotihuacán. In this way, the broader significance of the dissertation will be to present a model for an ‘ethical archaeology’ entrusted with a global heritage of diverse interests.

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