INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

What are the ethical issues involved in CRM? Besides
all the usual ethical issues that concern the whole
profession of archaeology, management decisions by
agencies and for-profit firms have complex sets of
circumstances. Often clients will hire the contract
archaeology company that is the low bidder, not the
best (as we see in all other areas of life!). I have done
small contracts with archaeology students and had the
developer offer me more money if I promise not to
find any archaeological sites! Ethical training is
becoming more and more important as the profession
of archaeology becomes dominated by practitioners in
CRM and contract positions.
What do we mean by curation, materials conservation,
and collections management? All the artifacts and data
recovered by field archaeology must be stored in such
a fashion that they will not decay, that they can be
easily located for further research, available for public
appreciation, and cared for into the indefinite future.
This is expensive and labor-intensive, and many
professionals ignore it because it is more fun to dig.
The sometimes tedious listing of every item in every
bag and the treatment of decaying items and storage of materials in sturdy, non-degradable
containers is the part of archaeology seldom seen or realized by both many professionals and the
public.
Is looting a big threat to the archaeological record? The book places the topic of looting first in
this last chapter, but modern construction and our explosion of population that results in everexpanding
human effects upon the landscape destroy more archaeology than individual looters.
However, there is always looting, probably since the first burials of important people with wealth
items! King Tut’s tomb was remarkable not for its
outstanding wealth or even the importance of the
teenage insignificant king himself, but because it was
NOT looted and therefore full of gold and other
goodies in original context. Most of the other, far more
famous Egyptian rulers’ tombs were robbed—
probably before the body was cold, if not later in time.
What about the popular images of antiquities looting?
Yes, that is how Indiana Jones begins, raiding for the
lost ark, and Lara Croft is actually named “tomb
raider.” We have a little problem here with public
understanding of what archaeologists do and why it is
destructive to grab artifacts out of context. Now
various websites are set to pop up in your search