An Ethical Approach to Uncovering the Past

Anthropologist Anne-Marie Cantwell explores the ethical dilemmas that those in her field face and provides guidance for acknowledging past injustices.

Published March 1, 2000

By Fred Moreno, Anne de León, and Jennifer Tang
Academy Contributors

When you think of archaeology, you don’t normally think of New York City.

But Anne-Marie Cantwell, a professor at Rutgers University-Newark, exemplifies that combination to a “T.” She’s one of America’s most prominent archaeologists and New York City is one of her main areas of fieldwork. But her research interests extend beyond urban archaeology to include Hopewellian societies, complex hunter-gatherers, mortuary systems, trade networks, the anthropology of death, and contact between Native American and European societies.

In her work, Cantwell has underscored the ethical dilemmas faced by anthropologists as their relationship to the indigenous peoples they study has undergone changes reflecting pre- and post-colonialist attitudes, the emergence of civil and human rights and the “modern social identities” created by globalization. It is these dilemmas that prompted a conference that she helped organize at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) and the Annals volume she co-edited (with Eva Friedlander and Madelaine Tramm) on its deliberations, Ethics in Anthropology.

Topics of Concern for Anthropologists

The Academy volume followed shortly after the release of a controversial book on the Amazon’s Yanomami Indians, which raised accusations and allegations of misconduct among researchers.

“Many of the ethical issues highlighted by the Yanomami uproar have long been topics of concern for anthropologists,” she says. “This concern is reflected in ongoing discussions at regional and national meetings, codes of ethics, dialogues in professional journals, newsletters, and in innumerable collegial conversations around the world.”

Professor Cantwell’s essay in the Annals volume focuses on the repatriation of human remains to indigenous peoples in Australia and the U.S. and the role anthropologists play in the construction of past, present, and future identities for contemporary indigenous peoples. She believes that anthropologists are “increasingly involved in the witting and unwitting reproduction of indigenous social orders,” due to the combination of heritage/cultural resource management legislation, government regulations, and changing professional ethics.

A vocal supporter of human rights for indigenous peoples, Cantwell suggests the possibility of a new kind of future “if archaeologists work collaboratively with indigenous peoples to acknowledge past injustices and common ground.”