Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the ethics of landscape archaeology. Or, perhaps more accurately, it considers the non-ethics of current practice, arguing that, by treating archaeological landscapes as things and separating archaeological concerns from other interests, archaeologists have distanced themselves from ethical questions and limited their capacity of autonomous moral action.

Paper long abstract:

For some, the landscape is an object to be recorded and analysed, a palimpsest of archaeological features. For others, landscape archaeology is about experience and engagement and it explores interactions between people and their environment. Both of these discourses feature in archaeological practice: it is now routine for archaeologists to engage in work to conserve, protect, manage and record both the physical archaeological landscape and the relationship between particular places and their surroundings. Such landscape work has become naturalised, routine, an unquestioned part of what archaeologists do.

This paper argues that, while different landscape discourses might have different philosophical roots, much of this difference has been lost in translation as these discourses have been adapted to the world of heritage practice. In practice, archaeologists are always required to treat landscapes as objects, and questions of experience are reduced to the relationship between one part of the object (a site) and others (its setting).

This focus on landscapes as things, together with the separation of archaeological interests from other (natural, social, economic etc.) interests and an insensitivity to the contexts within which we work, has limited the archaeologist's capacity for moral action. This is significant because archaeologists engage in work which impacts on the lives of others. In binding ourselves to the interests of things, we reduce our capacity to consider human relationships. In separating and distancing archaeological from other concerns, we limit our moral autonomy, subscribing to overly-prescriptive ways of thinking and strictly limiting our scope for action.