who owns paleontology?

[Adrienne Mayor <afmayor@aol.com>]

Paleontologists--academic, amateur, and commercial--who have been 
following the debates over Who Owns Paleontology might be interested to 
know that a very similar controversy exists in a related field.

Debate over who owns the rights to find, dig, possess, and interpret 
important relics from the past has been simmering and occasionally 
boiling over in the field of archaeology.

Archaeology, like paleontology, also began with amateurs and has been 
greatly advanced by independent workers, but was transformed into a 
formal academic discipline with professional gate-keeping. 
Archaeological artifacts are highly desirable to private collectors and 
museums, with lucrative market in relics. Heated debate flares over 
buying and selling artifacts and whether private owners allow 
scientific access, who should control and publish ancient material, how 
to deal with looters and the black market in artifacts, etc.

These debates have been occurring publicly in the pages of the popular 
magazine Archaeology Odyssey, which acknowledges the value of amateur 
and commercial participation in archaeology. Its rival is the magazine 
Archaeology, put out by the academic Archaeological Institute of 
America, which rejects all commerical archaeology and frowns on 
"amateurs."

Over the past 5 years Odyssey has published a series of fiery exchanges 
btw the founder-editor Hershel Shanks and British archaeologist Colin 
Renfrew on these issues. The editorial in this month's issue of 
Archaeology Odyssey (May-June 2005) discusses the conflict between the 
"professional elite" of archaeologists "who seem to think that they own 
the past, as well as the privilege of speaking publicly about the 
history of humanity." He notes that some academic archaeologists refuse 
to supply photos of their digs for Odyssey's news reports because they 
disagree with the magazine's approach to stopping looting. He concludes 
that "professional arrogance" is just another "ugly manifestation of a 
common occupational snobbery by archaeologists who consider themselves 
the owners of history."