ABSTRACT
Archaeology’s engagement with politics and its larger framing within global developments are direct outgrowths of a specific disciplinary trajectory that has slowly embraced interventions from social theory, politics, philosophy, feminism and indigenous scholarship. During the 1980s and 1990s many archaeologists deepened their awareness and application of social theory, while the 1990s and 2000s were marked by recognition of the field’s sociopolitical embedding. In recent years practitioners have become increasingly concerned with the ethical implications of their research and, more importantly, the politics of fieldwork and collaborations with local people, descendants, indigenous groups and other communities of connection (e.g. Hall 2005; Hodder 1998; Joyce 2005; Lilley and Williams 2005; Meskell 2005a, 2005b; Smith 2004; Watkins 2004; Zimmerman et al. 2003). Ethics itself has become the subject of numerous volumes (e.g. Lynott and Wylie 2000; Meskell and Pels 2005; Messenger 1999; Vitelli and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006), as had politics and nationalism before that, and these were not simply Euro-American trends but were more often driven by archaeologists from Latin America, Australasia, Africa and the Middle East (see Abdi 2001; Funari 2004; Ndoro 2001; Politis 2001; Scham and Yahya 2003; Shepherd 2002).
