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Authority vs power: capitalism, archaeology and the populist challenge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2018

Alfredo González-Ruibal
Affiliation:
Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Avenida de Vigo s/n, 15705 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Pablo Alonso González*
Affiliation:
Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología (IPNA), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Avenida Astrofisico Francisco Sánchez, 3, 38206 San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain
Felipe Criado-Boado
Affiliation:
Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Avenida de Vigo s/n, 15705 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
*
*Author for correspondence (Email: pabloag10@hotmail.com)

Extract

We thank all of the commentators for raising crucial points that provide us with the opportunity to make important clarifications. Bernbeck and Pollock point out that in our work, only the people of the present matter, rather than those in the past. Although our discussion centres on living people, we also believe that the past is unfinished and that working with it allows us to build a different future. We also believe that archaeology has a responsibility towards the dead. We are, in a Derridean spirit, committed to “those others who are no longer or [. . .] not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born” (Derrida 2012: 18). There is, however, more than an ethical dimension to this; our plea for a new objectivity means that we are interested in the past qua past, not just in representations of the past in the present.

Type
Debate
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2018 

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References

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