Is Open Inquiry Unethical?
On the Society for American Archaeology's revised ethical principles
Ethical principles
The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) is the world’s largest professional archaeological organization, comprised of professors, students, cultural resource professionals, government employees, and others invested in the study and preservation of the past. Although it began as an American institution, the SAA has an increasingly cosmopolitan membership comprised of archaeologists throughout the world. Thus, at their large, often overwhelming annual meetings, one can observe academic presentations on everything from African Middle Stone Age sites exceeding 100,000 years old to historic battlefields in the American west and everything in between, a staggering array of the world’s past brought together by the SAA through a shared love of understanding who humans are and how we got here.
As you might imagine, SAA’s membership represents a great diversity of opinions regarding how the past is best studied, preserved, and interpreted to the public. Recognizing the need for some unifying standards, the SAA adopted 8 Principles of Archaeological Ethics in 1996 to provide a framework for how archaeologists should most responsibly conduct their work. They added a 9th in 2016. They don’t have much teeth from a punitive standpoint, but they are important in establishing a mutually intelligible ethical framework to which members can refer when conflicts arise.
Are you being asked to appraise or validate the authenticity of a collection of artifacts? Ethical Principle No. 3: Commercialization suggests that might not be a good idea. Being saddled with a pile of documents and artifacts from a retired archaeologist that you don’t necessarily want to deal with? Ethical Principle No. 7: Records and Preservation suggests you should probably suck it up and dive in. The SAA’s ethical principles reflect, for the most part, common sense best practices that most archaeologists embody in their work each day. But in 2018, the SAA decided to begin the long process of updating their ethical principles for the 21st century.
Updating ethics
At the 2018 annual meeting, the SAA’s Board of Directors established a task force responsible for updating their ethical principles. Since then, this task force has embarked upon a long and admirably careful process of gathering information and opinions from throughout the global archaeological community on what a revised list of archaeological ethical principles should look like. Their first step (named stage 1) was to reach out to other organizations who had recently revised their own ethics documents, like the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), and the Canadian Archaeological Association (CAA), among others, to determine best practices and lessons learned on implementing changes to ethical principles. Task force stage 2 solicited comments from the SAA membership and other stakeholders, while stage 3 was responsible for drafting revised principles. On February 15th, 2023, approaching 5 years after initiating the process, SAA President Dan Sandweiss sent the membership a completed draft of their revised ethical principles.
The document is still comprised of 9 ethical principles, though each has changed in substantive ways. Structurally, Principle No. 7: Records and Preservation has been largely combined with Principle No. 5: Intellectual Property in order to make room for a new Principle No 9: Diversity and Inclusion. Four of the principles have been renamed to reflect modified text, for example “Accountability” to “Responsibility” and “Public Education and Outreach” to “Public Education and Community Engagement”. The text is around 25% longer than before, from around 800 to around 1,000 words total, primarily due to expanded discussions of public outreach and training and resources, but also because it is generally much wordier. At times, the principles read more like philosophical statements or government regulations than general principles.
As a member of the SAA’s standing ethics committee, I was tasked with making comments on the revised ethical principles to send to the Board of Directors to inform their decisions. Although I made minor comments on much of the document, the majority of my thoughts were focused on one aspect of the revised ethical principles that I found most troublesome, wording throughout that seems to indicate a move away from supporting open inquiry of the archaeological record.
A challenge to open inquiry?
A major emphasis of these revised principles is engaging people variously referred to as ‘affected groups’, ‘impacted communities’, ‘descendants’, ‘Indigenous communities’, or ‘other interested parties’ in every aspect of archaeological work, from what to research in the first place (No. 5: Preservation of the Archaeological Record) to how to report results (No. 2: Responsibility and No. 6: Reporting) and interpret them to the public (No. 4: Public Education and Community Engagement). For instance, principle No. 5 states that:
“descendant and indigenous communities...should be included in decisions regarding...the pursuit of intellectual knowledge”
This reads to me like archaeological questions themselves should be subject to collaborative approval before we even begin. This line of thought carries through to Principle No. 2, which states that:
“Archaeologists must...collaborating (sic)...with groups affected by their work to achieve results in a mutually agreeable and beneficial manner”
and to No. 6 when it says archaeologists:
“should recognize the intellectual input of Indigenous communities or other interested parties” [in their reporting]
To my eyes, aspects of these revised ethical principles sound like archaeologists are being asked to alter our research objectives, reporting, and results in accord with the desires of others that may or may not appreciate our work. Whether intended or not, these statements and others like them appear to imply that open inquiry, or the free exchange of ideas, is no longer considered ethical by the Society for American Archaeology.
While actively engaging affected groups is an admirable practice and often productive, I disagree that archaeologists should be compelled to alter their research practices and especially their results to accommodate the beliefs of affected groups or else be stigmatized as unethical by the SAA. Collaboration with affected groups can add depth and meaning to archaeological investigations that is often lacking, and I don’t object to it at all. It can at times result in truly great research that moves the discipline in new and interesting directions. But conducting empirical inquiry with some distance from proximate cultural context is also a valuable exercise in its own right, and these revised principles seem to stigmatize its merits. At its worst, altering results or interpretations in ways that are ‘agreeable and beneficial’ is considered grossly unethical in almost every other discipline because it subjects the empirical process to the whims of contemporary politics. Comparable ethical principles are certainly not imposed on, for instance, drug trials or research on life-threatening illnesses. Compelling archaeologists to structure their investigations in this way is a step too far and could easily slide into a censorious academic culture.
I realize that these additions were primarily motivated by a desire to further engage North American indigenous communities with archaeological practice, but it’s also worth considering some unintended consequences that might emerge should the SAA no longer support an ethics environment that values open inquiry. I grew up in a place where archaeology was considered a direct threat to evangelical Christian narratives about a young earth origin of around 6,000 years. In this culture, every archaeological investigation that exceeds 6,000 years old has the potential to undermine the deeply held religious faith of millions of Americans, and given language in these revised principles, archaeologists would have an ethical responsibility to address the concerns of this affected group to reach mutually agreeable results. The same could be said of many religious groups who hold origin beliefs that contradict scientific consensus. I have no doubt that these revisions were made with good intentions, but good ethical principles should hold true regardless of the circumstances thrown at them, and I am afraid these aspects of the revisions might lead the Society down some unanticipated paths they might not like.
A different direction
American archaeology is fairly polarized right now and that tension is apparent in the text of these revised principles, which at once acknowledge the value of scientific inquiry and accept alternative ways of knowing the past. Given how distinct these ways of knowing can be, the revised ethics principles do an admirable job of striking that balance.
However, I can’t help but think that the attempt to reconcile these approaches to studying the past by enshrining them as ethical principles might be misguided. Certain aspects of indigenous, descendant, or otherwise faith-based worldviews fundamentally conflict with aspects of liberal, open inquiry, and vise versa. Trying to meld the two into a single ethical framework only dilutes the impact of both. The intellectual contributions of the various communities mentioned in these revised principles are valuable in their own right. Creating an ethical framework that grafts them onto empirically-oriented archaeological studies both diminishes their inherent value and may force empirically-focused archaeologists to make unacceptable sacrifices to their methods and interpretations. Certainly, there are researchers that are quite successful at bridging this divide, but these revised ethical principles seem to suggest that ALL archaeological studies should attempt to do so. I don’t think that’s realistic nor do I think it’s fair to stigmatize archaeologists who fail at it as unethical.
If the goal is to recognize the contributions of those groups most affected by archaeological research, I would much rather see an initiative that supports and promotes their academic contributions on their own terms rather than one that attempts to force them into an existing, empirically-oriented framework. If these distinct approaches to knowing the past independently land on similar answers, then that only strengthens the discipline further. If they don’t, then that conflict can occur in the peer-reviewed literature, where each can be evaluated on its merits in an open, transparent manner. A Journal of Indigenous Archaeology would be a good start, as would SAA initiatives that actively promote good faith debate. We don’t need to sacrifice empiricism to uplift alternative viewpoints of the past.
The future of archaeological ethics
In task force stage 1’s initial outreach efforts, the American Anthropological Association recommended making ethical principles a “living document” that can be expeditiously changed alongside shifting ethical and political circumstances. Surveys that accompanied task force stage 2 suggested that SAA’s young (<29), female, and non-binary members are especially supportive of this option (Marwick et al. 2021). It looks like the SAA has wisely not yet adopted this approach, and I hope it stays that way. If ethical principles are simply a constantly shifting landscape of cultural norms and attitudes, then what use are they at all? As task force 1 recognized, “timeless is difficult to do well,” but I think it is well worth pursuing. It is extremely naive, if not a little creepy, to expect the cosmopolitan, demographically diverse membership of a large professional society to shift their ethical norms in lockstep with each other and with the small number of committee members responsible for their maintenence.
Archaeological ethical principles should be simple, intuitive, and widely held among practicing archaeologists, and those that the SAA currently have in place meet those criteria well. The SAA’s pro-active approach to updating their ethical principles is admirable, but ultimately I think they got pretty close to “timeless” principles the first go around. Survey results from stage 2 of this process presented by Pruski et al. 2021 confirm that the vast majority of SAA’s membership (84%) thinks1 the existing ethical principles adequately address the situations they experience in the profession. I still see alot of my own values reflected in the revised principles, but I cannot in good faith support an ethical system hostile toward open inquiry.
If you are an SAA member and wish to comment on the revised ethical principles, the SAA Board is hosting a forum on March 31st from 8:00am to 9:45am PST at the annual meeting in Portland. If you cannot attend in person, there will be a Zoom option available.
Is either neutral, agrees, or strongly agrees
This is, of course, the same association that deplatformed my talk in 2021 (see: https://quillette.com/2021/06/13/why-is-the-society-for-american-archaeology-promoting-indigenous-creationism/ and https://youtu.be/bZ5HNimJU08). These changes are to stop open inquiry, increase self-censorship, and to appease the groups that can cut off access to collections. Although some well-intentioned people may think that this isn't an obstruction to science and open inquiry, I have my doubts about the intentions of others.