Archaeology Under Fire addresses archaeology's role in current political issues, whether it be the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the division of Cyprus, or the continued destruction of Beirut.

Anthropologists who talk about ethics generally mean the code of practice drafted by a professional association for implementation by its members. As this book convincingly shows, such a conception is far too narrow. A more radical approach is to recognize that moral judgments are made at every juncture of scientific practice and they require a negotiation of responsibility with all stakeholders in the research enterprise.Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes - from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls.This important book is an essential guide for all anthropologists who wish to be active contributors to the discussion on ethics and the ethical practice of their profession.

Anthropologists who talk about ethics generally mean the code of practice drafted by a professional association for implementation by its members. As this book convincingly shows, such a conception is far too narrow. A more radical approach is to recognize that moral judgments are made at every juncture of scientific practice and they require a negotiation of responsibility with all stakeholders in the research enterprise.Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes - from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls.This important book is an essential guide for all anthropologists who wish to be active contributors to the discussion on ethics and the ethical practice of their profession.

Egypt looms large in the Western imagination. Whether it is our attraction to pharaonic art, the pyramids or practices of mummification, Egypts unique understanding of materiality speaks to us across space and time. Is it because the ancient Egyptians fetishized material objects that we find their culture captivating today? And what exactly do Egyptian remains tell us about biography, embodiment, memory, materiality, and the self? Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt takes New Kingdom Egypt (1539-1070 BC) as its starting point and considers how excavated objects reveal the complex ways that ancient Egyptians experienced their material world. From life to death, the material world instantiated, reflected and influenced social life and existence for ancient Egyptians. Thus, in Meskells unique approach to the materiality and sensuousness of subjects and objects, we uncover the philosophical, spiritual and human meanings embedded in these cultural artefacts. Meskells book explores the fundamental existential questions that not only preoccupied ancient Egyptians, but continue to fascinate people today. What is the essence of persons and things? How might we understand the situated experiences of material life, the constitution of the object world and its shaping of human experience? How might objects successfully mediate between worlds? In the final analysis, Meskell moves forward through time and examines the consumption and appreciation of these Egyptian material objects in the contemporary world. Materiality is our physical engagement with the world, our medium for inserting ourselves into the fabric of that world and our way of constituting and shaping culture in an embodied and external sense. From that perspective it is very much the domain of anthropology and archaeology.Drawing on a wide range of objects, artefacts, and artwork, from Valley of the Kings through to Las Vegas, Meskell provides an elegant analysis of the aesthetics of ancient Egyptian material culture

Archaeology Under Fire addresses archaeology's role in current political issues, whether it be the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the division of Cyprus, or the continued destruction of Beirut.

Best known for its World Heritage program committed to "the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity," the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded in 1945 as an intergovernmental agency aimed at fostering peace, humanitarianism, and intercultural understanding. Its mission was inspired by leading European intellectuals such as Henri Bergson, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, and Aldous and Julian Huxley. Often critiqued for its inherent Eurocentrism, UNESCO and its World Heritage program today remain embedded within modernist principles of "progress" and "development" and subscribe to the liberal principles of diplomacy and mutual tolerance. However, its mission to prevent conflict, destruction, and intolerance, while noble and much needed, increasingly falls short, as recent battles over the World Heritage sites of Preah Vihear, Chersonesos, Jerusalem, Palmyra, Aleppo, and Sana'a, among others, have underlined. A Future in Ruins is the story of UNESCO's efforts to save the world's heritage and, in doing so, forge an international community dedicated to peaceful co-existence and conservation. It traces how archaeology and internationalism were united in Western initiatives after the political upheavals of the First and Second World Wars. This formed the backdrop for the emergent hopes of a better world that were to captivate the "minds of men." UNESCO's leaders were also confronted with challenges and conflicts about their own mission. Would the organization aspire to intellectual pursuits that contributed to the dream of peace or instead be relegated to an advisory and technical agency? An eye-opening and long overdue account of a celebrated yet poorly understood agency, A Future in Ruins calls on us all to understand how and why the past comes to matter in the present, who shapes it, and who wins or loses as a consequence.

Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite conceptions of the afterlife. This scintillating book examines how ordinary ancient Egyptians lived their lives. Drawing on the remarkably rich and detailed archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence from some 450 years of the New Kingdom, as well as recent theoretical innovations from several fields, it reconstructs private and social life from birth to death. The result is a meaningful portrait composed of individual biographies, communities, and landscapes.

Structured according to the cycles of life, the book relies on categories that the ancient Egyptians themselves used to make sense of their lives. Lynn Meskell gracefully sifts the evidence to reveal Egyptian domestic arrangements, social and family dynamics, sexuality, emotional experience, and attitudes toward the cadences of human life. She discusses how the Egyptians of the New Kingdom constituted and experienced self, kinship, life stages, reproduction, and social organization. And she examines their creation of communities and the material conditions in which they lived. Also included is neglected information on the formation of locality and the construction of gender and sexual identity and new evidence from the mortuary record, including important new data on the burial of children. Throughout, Meskell is careful to highlight differences among ancient Egyptians--the ways, for instance, that ethnicity, marital status, age, gender, and occupation patterned their experiences.

Readers will come away from this book with new insights on how life may have been experienced and conceived of by ancient Egyptians in all their variety. This makes Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt unique in Egyptology and fascinating to read.

Best known for its World Heritage program committed to "the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity," the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded in 1945 as an intergovernmental agency aimed at fostering peace, humanitarianism, and intercultural understanding. Its mission was inspired by leading European intellectuals such as Henri Bergson, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, and Aldous and Julian Huxley. Often critiqued for its inherent Eurocentrism, UNESCO and its World Heritage program today remain embedded within modernist principles of "progress" and "development" and subscribe to the liberal principles of diplomacy and mutual tolerance. However, its mission to prevent conflict, destruction, and intolerance, while noble and much needed, increasingly falls short, as recent battles over the World Heritage sites of Preah Vihear, Chersonesos, Jerusalem, Palmyra, Aleppo, and Sana'a, among others, have underlined. A Future in Ruins is the story of UNESCO's efforts to save the world's heritage and, in doing so, forge an international community dedicated to peaceful co-existence and conservation. It traces how archaeology and internationalism were united in Western initiatives after the political upheavals of the First and Second World Wars. This formed the backdrop for the emergent hopes of a better world that were to captivate the "minds of men". UNESCO's leaders were also confronted with challenges and conflicts about their own mission. Would the organization aspire to intellectual pursuits that contributed to the dream of peace or instead be relegated to an advisory and technical agency? An eye-opening and long overdue account of a celebrated yet poorly understood agency, A Future in Ruins calls on us all to understand how and why the past comes to matter in the present, who shapes it, and who wins or loses as a consequence.

An important collection, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies delves into the politics of contemporary archaeology in an increasingly complex international environment. The contributors explore the implications of applying the cosmopolitan ideals of obligation to others and respect for cultural difference to archaeological practice, showing that those ethics increasingly demand the rethinking of research agendas. While cosmopolitan archaeologies must be practiced in contextually specific ways, what unites and defines them is archaeologists' acceptance of responsibility for the repercussions of their projects, as well as their undertaking of heritage practices attentive to the concerns of the living communities with whom they work. These concerns may require archaeologists to address the impact of war, the political and economic depredations of past regimes, the livelihoods of those living near archaeological sites, or the incursions of transnational companies and institutions. The contributors describe various forms of cosmopolitan engagement involving sites that span the globe. They take up the links between conservation, natural heritage and ecology movements, and the ways that local heritage politics are constructed through international discourses and regulations. They are attentive to how communities near heritage sites are affected by archaeological fieldwork and findings, and to the complex interactions that local communities and national bodies have with international sponsors and universities, conservation agencies, development organizations, and NGOs. Whether discussing the toll of efforts to preserve biodiversity on South Africans living near Kruger National Park, the ways that UNESCO's global heritage project universalizes the ethic of preservation, or the Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk that the Archaeological Institute of America sent to the U.S. government before the Iraq invasion, the contributors provide nuanced assessments of the ethical implications of the discursive production, consumption, and governing of other people's pasts. Contributors. O. Hugo Benavides, Lisa Breglia, Denis Byrne, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal, Ian Hodder, Ian Lilley, Jane Lydon, Lynn Meskell, Sandra Arnold Scham

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that , ll history becomes subjective, that, in fact, properly there is no history, only biography.? Today, Emerson's observation is hardly revolutionary for archaeologists; it has become conventional wisdom that the present is a battleground where interpretations of the events and meanings of the past are constantly being disputed. What were the major events? Whose lives did these events impact, and how? Who were the key players? What was their legacy? We know all too well that the answers to these questions can vary considerably depending on what political, social, or personal agenda is driving the response.Despite our keen eye for discerning historical spin doctors operating today, it has been only in recent years that archaeologists have begun exploring in detail how the past was used in the past itself. This volume of ten original works brings critical insight to this frequently overlooked dimension of earlier societies. Drawing on the concepts of identity, memory, and landscape, the contributors show how these points of entry can lead to substantially new accounts of how people understood their lives and why things changed as they did. Chapters include the archaeologies of the eastern Mediterranean, including Mesopotamia, Iran, Greece, and Rome; prehistoric Greece; Achaemenid and Hellenistic Armenia; Athens in the Roman period; Nubia and Egypt; medieval South India; and northern Maya Quintana Roo. The contributors show how and why, in each society, certain versions of the past were promoted while others were aggressively forgotten for the purpose of promoting innovation, gaining political advantage, or creating a new group identity.Commentaries by leading scholars Lynn Meskell and Jack Davis blend with newer voices to create a unique set of essays that is diverse but interrelated, exceptionally researched, and novel in its perspectives. CONTENTS 1. Peering into the Palimpsest: An Introduction to the Volume Norman Yoffee 2. Collecting, Defacing, Reinscribing (and Otherwise Performing) Memory in the Ancient World Catherine Lyon Crawford 3. Unforgettable Landscapes: Attachments to the Past in Hellenistic Armenia Lori Khatchadourian 4. Mortuary Studies, Memory, and the Mycenaean Polity Seth Button 5. Identity under Construction in Roman Athens Sanjaya Thakur 6. Inscribing the Napatan Landscape: Architecture and Royal Identity Lindsay Ambridge 7. Negotiated Pasts and the Memorialized Present in Ancient India: Chalukyas of Vatapi Hemanth Kadambi 8. Creating, Transforming, Rejecting, and Reinterpreting Ancient Maya Urban Landscapes: Insights from Lagartera and Margarita Laura P. Villamil 9. Back to the Future: From the Past in the Present to the Past in the Past Lynn Meskell 10. Memory Groups and the State: Erasing the Past and Inscribing the Present in the Landscapes of the Mediterranean and Near East Jack L. Davis About the Editor About the Contributors Index