In recent years, archaeologists have begun to confront a range of ethical issues—the conundrum of looting, the interactions we have with descendent and local communities, the complications of business-oriented professional archaeology, and the complexities of personal and academic relations in education and museum contexts. . How the next generation of scholars chose to address these and other ethical dilemmas will define the field of archaeology—what it offers and what it does—in the new millennium.
In 2004, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) inaugurated the Ethics Bowl at its annual meeting in Montreal, Canada to help students gain a sense of ethical responsibility and give them the tools to tackle professional ethics in an enjoyable setting. During the Ethics Bowl, teams of graduate and/or undergraduate students debate case studies which illuminate a variety of ethical issues in modern archaeology. Student teams consist of three to five individuals, guided by at least one faculty mentor. In 2024 first Ethics Bowl in the UK will take place at TAG2024 in Bournemouth. After 20 years of operation, the Ethics Bowl at the SAA has now become a regular and eagerly contested debate competition and sponsored by the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA). Teams of students from different universities compete by debating solutions to the ethical dilemmas archaeologists face in our day-to-day lives. Archaeologists employed in different areas of work act as judges, throw curveball questions to the teams that extend or change key components of the cases, grade the teams on their responses and then decide which teams advance to the final round and compete for prizes. It’s an awesome experience and a great opportunity to practice ethical decision making before being placed in a hard situation in real life. Judges in the USA have regularly commented that Ethics Bowl contestants demonstrate stronger ethical decision making skills than many working archaeologists have sometimes shown.
For this first Ethics Bowl session in the UK, the aim is to show UK students the nature and value of the Ethics Bowl event, with less focus on the competition between teams and more emphasis given to examining the proposed courses of action that our hypothetical individuals face. The RPA have sponsored the UK event and have chosen 8 recent case studies used at the Ethics Bowl in the USA that are applicable to the UK context. All students are welcome to attend, offer their judgements, and in the process hopefully gain something from thinking about these ethical dilemmas.
