The Promise and Perils of an Ethic of Stewardship
Alison Wylie
Abstract
The emergence of the New Archaeology is usually cited as instituting an optimistic age of self-consciously scientific practice, dedicated to the pursuit of internally defined, anthropological goals the significance of which was marked by their generality: the understanding of long-term cultural processes operating on a scale well beyond the lifeworld interests of individual agents and localized cultural traditions. The vision of archaeology that was so compelling for the author's graduate classmate-a research discipline driven by its own internal cognitive values, uncompromised by the demands of accountability to external interest groups-was still a powerful force in the archaeological community. Archaeologists have established their professional, disciplinary identity by exploiting a series of contrasts with nonanthropological, nonscientific interests in the archaeological record: initially nineteenth-century antiquarian and twentieth-century commercial interests and subsequently a range of (merely) descriptive, particularistic interests.