May2014

TEACHING ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURYTable 1. The Seven Curriculum Goals and Their Corresponding Ethical PrinciplesCurriculum Goals (Bender and Smith 2000) Ethical Principles (Lynott and Wylie 1995)StewardshipStewardship; Records and Preservation; Intellectual PropertyDiverse PastsAccountabilitySocial RelevancePublic Education and OutreachEthics and ValuesN/AWritten and Oral CommunicationPublic Reporting and PublicationFundamental Archaeological SkillsTraining and ResourcesReal-World Problem SolvingNoneThe similarities between the eight ethical principles and theseven curriculum goals are remarkable (Table 1). No fewerthan seven of the curriculum goals have clear ethical dimensionsor are drawn from the principles themselves. Stewardshipappears on both lists, a critical inclusion consideringthe rate at which archaeological sites are being lost. The curriculumgoal of recognizing diverse pasts is also part of ethicalbehavior with regard to archaeology’s relationship todescendant communities. This is “Accountability” from thelist of principles. As a discipline, we must understand andteach our students that we do not necessarily have a monopolyon the interpretation of prehistoric human culturalbehaviors and that the past has power in the present. As withthe extreme case of Puebloan cannibalism, descendant communitieshave a vested interest in what “truths” are disseminatedto an interested public, and we should take great carewhen dealing with such incendiary claims. Indigenousknowledge and oral history is also playing a larger interpretiverole today than in the past, and how archaeologists managethese competing/complementary interests is increasinglyan integral part of ethics discussions in classrooms. Ethicsand values also inform “Written and Oral Communication,”particularly when dealing with our responsibility to publishthe results of our work in both professional and public outlets.“Teaching Fundamental Skills” ensures that fieldresearch will be conducted according to the highest standardsof the discipline into the future. Articulating the socialrelevance of the past is also ethical to the extent that it isrelated to accountability and our uses of archaeological data.Real-world problem solving is the only goal that is not asimmediately tied to ethical behavior, though it certainlycould be if we designed problem-solving or critical thinkingexercises using one of the other goals, even with somethingas putatively ethics-free as budget design.If ethics and values can range from excavation methodologyto how we incorporate stakeholders into our analyses andinterpretation, then all facets of an archaeological educationconsider ethics in some form. The question becomeswhether or not we are making such linkages in our classrooms.Assuming that most introductory archaeology coursesuse textbooks, one easy way to discern the importancegiven to ethical topics is to see how such topics are coveredin commonly used texts. For this discussion, I consulted fiveof the more popular introductory texts: Ashmore and Sharer’s(2010) Discovering Our Past: A Brief Introduction toArchaeology, Fifth Edition; Feder’s (2008) Linking to the Past: ABrief Introduction to Archaeology, Second Edition; Kelly andThomas’s (2013) Archaeology, Sixth Edition; Renfrew andBahn’s (2008) Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice,Fifth Edition; and Sutton’s (2013) Archaeology: The Science ofthe Human Past, Fourth Edition. I also considered the briefdiscussion of ethics by Juli in Rice and McCurdy’s (2002)Strategies in Teaching Anthropology volume.According to many syllabi, ethics are covered in only one ortwo class periods, which are often scheduled during the latestportion of the semester. This relegation of ethics to theend of the term is understandable, given that most coursecalendars are designed to match the order of chapters in thetextbooks we use, and “ethics chapters” are by and large thelast chapters in the books (Table 2). At first blush, this wouldseem ignominious for such a critical topic. Are our authorsusing ethics as an important “takeaway message” that capsthe class as a whole, or is ethics truly one of those subjects tobe squeezed in only after the much more important lessonsabout dating and typology have been digested? More critically,what messages about ethics are being absorbed by studentswho may be otherwise distracted by looming finalexams and term paper deadlines?Though textbook chapters specifically devoted to ethics andvalues comprise the final chapters of books, subjects that areusually discussed under the rubric of ethics and values (e.g.,looting) are also found elsewhere. Ashmore and Sharer(2010), for example, include a brief paragraph on professionalresponsibilities in Chapter 1 and Sutton discusses professionalfieldwork in Chapter 5. Similarly, Feder (2008) brieflyoutlines some of the standard topics in his Chapter 2,though his is the only text that does not include a separateethics chapter. Kelly and Thomas (2013) employ a uniquemethod of addressing topic. In addition to the requisite lasttwo chapters, chapters throughout the book also containclearly demarcated “What Does It Mean to Me?” and “LookingCloser” subtopics that cover ethical behavior by using specificexamples. For example, Chapter 10, on bioarchaeology, pres-16 The SAA Archaeological Record • May 2014