ABSTRACT
Why another book on ethics and socio-politics in archaeology? After all, in the last 25 years a good number of them has been produced (eg, Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990; Gero et al 1983; Kane 2003; Karlsson 2004; Lynott and Wylie 1995; Meskell and Pels 2005; Pinsky and Wylie 1989; Pluciennik 2001; Scarre and Scarre 2006; Zimmerman et al 2003), not to mention many others on looting, repatriation, indigenous archaeologies, and nationalism, which are linked one way or another to ethical and political issues. And this is just what has come out in English (although some of these volumes include contributions from outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition). So why add to the inflation of titles, put further pressures on already struggling academic libraries, and waste world resources? How can we justify the production of this book, beyond the academics’ ambitions to publish and further careers, the editors’ ambitions to set academic agendas, and the publishers’ hopes to compete in the crowded market of academic publishing?
