Commentary: on the debate on ethics in African archaeology

Abstract

While commenting on the debate on ethics in African archaeology, this paper asks for a contextualisation of archaeological practice in territorial entanglements where capital, state and science — including archaeology — meet with local territorial agencies in encounters that work as battlegrounds where globalised discourses and practices (corporations, states, science) intervene in local territories, communities and knowledge. By codifying epistemic violence within its built-in assumptions, the archaeological discipline, has already taken fundamental ethical decisions regarding the Other. In order to decolonise archaeology an un-disciplining from those epistemic assumptions is needed. Such tasks may be aided by informing epistemic interests with local knowledge.