Digital technologies & archaeological ethics

Abstract

Emerging digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance research, communication, information sharing, interpretation, and conservation in archaeology and cultural heritage management. Digital technologies add extra dimensions to existing ethical questions, including the maintenance of professional standards and how to balance intellectual, cultural property, and other rights against the public ‘right to know’. Digital technologies also raise new issues that have ethical dimensions including technological, organisational and economic sustainability; proprietary interests in producing, promoting, funding and maintaining widely used digital technologies and platforms, and convergence of professional and ‘community’ practices in the digital sphere. The paper will discuss such questions drawing on information collected through recent qualitative research on use of digital communication technologies in archaeology and heritage practice and the presenter’s experiences in developing the New South Wales Archaeology Online sustainable digital archive.