Open Letter To Serious Archaeologists

Open Letter to Serious Archaeologists

A person spends years, often a lifetime, developing a skill that earns them a living—and more. What do they do with the "more"? They use it to entertain themselves. Many of those who succeed in a capitalist society are the sort of people who are interested in things like art, history, philosophy and the "social sciences". Why? Because they are intelligent, educated, inquisitive and because these subjects are usually a diversion from what they do every day. They are naturally more inclined to these disciplines than to the latest societal fad. The vast majority of people in the world who have discretionary income fall into this category.

Some people choose to follow the path of academia, and they "entertain" themselves with the same pleasures as those in the private sector. The difference is only that in the academic world it is not "kosher" to own, while in the private sector ownership is perceived as an inalienable right. Does this mean that the academic world and the private world are really worlds apart? Hardly. It merely means that the age-old conflicts of human want and need are confronted. What is new about that? By what standard is the steward of society's interests better than the member of society whose interests are supposedly being served?

For centuries, private and public scholarship have had a symbiotic relationship—especially in numismatics. That relationship was a constant proof that private and public interests can exist, prosperously, in harmony. In the 1970s, the situation began to change and the symbiosis was fractured by a surge of territorial dominance within the archaeological community. This escalated into a zealous crusade among archaeological organizations to eliminate private parties (independent scholars) from the "congregation". The discrimination against "non-certified" scholars became epidemic and grew to such a fanatical height that the archaeological community ostracized even its own members who would cooperate with the "heathen" masses. Scholarship for the sake of learning became scholarship for the sake of controlling.

Any rational and thinking person must, on serious reflection, be able to see that what happened to archeology over the past several decades has been a disaster of the greatest magnitude—not just for that discipline but for the whole of humanity. Today, we are told that the public is not qualified to inquire, not ordained to protect nor empowered to preserve the past. Is that the society that we have created? Is a government that supports that sort of mentality a government "of the people, by the people and for the people?" It sounds more like some of the experiments in governing that failed in the 20th century.

It is time that serious archaeologists took a stand and reclaimed their discipline from the brink of destruction—before the prestige earned by their predecessors is blackened by universal and eternal enmity.

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