Against global archaeological ethics: critical views from South America

Abstract

Archaeology as a discipline has been formed largely as a nation-state biopolitical device generating narratives and actions of control, management, classification, and ordering of persons and objects, pasts and presents, their stories, relationships and spaces from a Anglo-Saxon modern mode of knowledge production. In that sense, hegemonic archeology bears its colonial imprint and exhibits the principles that characterize modern Western science of universality, objectivity and rationalism. Thus, archeology has developed and expanded in close partnership with capitalism generating a true industry and mercantilization of the past. Simultaneously, it has been tried to globalize the vision of Western archeology and install a monoculture of knowledge to disqualify others worldview reducing and contracting the present and eliminating those conceptions that do not fit with the scientific canons and principles.