Dealing with the devil the faustian bargain of archaeology under dictatorship

Abstract

It is to be hoped that most members of the intended audience of this book have not experienced, and will not experience directly, the trauma of negotiating between principle and survival that characterizes the daily lives of people living in the shadow of totalitarian regimes. While compromise is an inescapable aspect of life, it can constrain activity to the point where the basic tenets of a discipline are undermined, requiring the practitioner to choose between prescribed practice and professional survival. This occurs on a kind of sliding ethical scale in all modern nation-states engaged in archaeological research, but it is particularly marked in dictatorships, in which the operating principle is that the state determines the scope and focus of the production and dissemination of knowledge about the archaeological past. © 2004 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York.