The Ethics of Cultural Heritage

Debates about the ethics of cultural heritage in the twentieth century were focused on the need to establish standards of professionalism and on the development of the skills and expertise required for rigorously objective conservation. The ethics of cultural heritage have often been conceived of in terms of three types of responsibilities: to the ‘archaeological record’ (or stewardship), to ‘diverse publics’ (or stakeholders) and to the profession and the discipline. This volume builds on recent approaches that move away from treating ethics as responsibilities to external domains and to the discipline and which seek to realign ethics with discussions of theory, practice and methods. The chapters in this collection chart a departure from the tradition of external heritage ethics, to a broader approach underpinned by the turn to human rights, issues of social justice and the political economy of heritage, conceptualising ethical responsibilities not as pertaining to the past but to a future-focused domain of social action.