sey075

The Society for American Archaeology has an election right now on whether or not to add a ninth principle to the society's list of principles of ethics. I just voted no. Here's why. This is the text, from the ballot site: First, these are not archaeological principles. They do not concern sites or artifacts or fieldwork or the archaeological record. Second, these are broader principles that affect far more than archaeology, yet they are written only for archaeology and archaeologists. In fact, their application to my lab would be discriminatory. Suppose I am nasty and I exploit students in an unsafe university lab, and I also discriminate and harass students inappropriately. If this were an official ethical principle of the SAA, it looks like my actions would be condemned for archaeology students working on one of my archaeology projects, but NOT for other students working on other projects (I also work on various projects on urbanism that are not archaeological). Or maybe I wi...

I just read a bizarre paper, "Occupy Archaeology! Towards an Activist Ethnoarchaeology of Occupy Denver" by Crystal Simms and Julien Riel-Slavatore in the SAA Archaeological Record (May 2016, pp. 33-39). I am interested in the campsites of the occupy movement because I think they have lessons to teach us about human settlement dynamics. I've published an article that includes discussion of the Occupy Portland campsite (Smith et al 2015), based on ethnographic fieldwork by Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman (You can see a summary of our project here ).  So, I was interested to see what these authors had to say about Occupy Denver. But I found, much to my surprise, that they have very little to say about the campsite. They do describe aspects of the campsite. But their goal was to use archaeological or ethnoarchaeological methods to answer a very specific question. When the Denver authorities claimed that the campsite was dirty, were they telling the truth? The authors make an arg...