Getting It Right and Getting It Wrong in Digital Archaeological Ethics

Though the ethics of archaeological practice have changed over the life of the discipline (and have arguably become more robust), full consideration has not yet been given to how digital methodologies and the emergence of digital technologies have created new areas requiring ethical introspection. The pace of adoption of digitally centred archaeological data and digitally facilitated archaeological practice has not been met by the adoption of discipline-wide standards related to archaeological ethics. The result of this mismatch in ethics and practice is the creation of archaeologists who utilize digital forms, but whose archaeology is ungrounded in frameworks that specifically consider the ethical burdens of digital tools, methodology, and theory. This chapter details views of digital archaeological ethics related to digital archaeology as tools, digital archaeology as methodology, and digital archaeological pedagogy.