Ethical concerns are increasingly coming to the fore in archaeology and anthropology and in many fields which touch on diversity of cultures.

Our efforts here are devoted to finding ever more co-operative and non-confrontational ways of promoting mutual respect for a diversity of traditions, with graciousness and tact, and of course doing no harm. This web page will not promote political correctness, but will try always to find creative ways to open more doors to co-operation, to make respect and tact become simply obvious common sense.

Perhaps the most important single key is to change thinking as much as we can, so that all traditions and peoples are part of “US”, true people, not treated as a “THEM”, as objects to be analyzed or used. This means peoples must have positions of responsibility in the handling of their own cultural traditions, just as do the majority in any society. A rare self-discipline is needed in marketing the culture of others in either scientific or popular press and in public meetings, finding what will interest audiences without sensationalizing the exotic, or even blatantly focusing on "witches, wars, cannibalism" as so many do. By definition, sensationalizing is misrepresentation, it is not valid science.

This also involves unaccustomed care in use of words which at first may not seem important. The word “myth”, when used to refer to another people's foundational traditions, is just as offensive as it would be to many Christians to refer to the Bible as "myth". Since we normally avoid being offensive in the one case, we should equally do so in all cases. That is what it means to treat everyone, not only some people, as part of “US”. That is what it means to not have official state-sanctioned establishment of religion.

There are even important opportunities to build alliances to improve majority culture. With creative co-operation we may find it easier to fix things in our national culture, such as abusive journalism and the hyping of violence which teaches children to casually kill. We should be able to build new alliances in which such treatment of members of all cultures, including those of majority cultures, is greatly reduced. There are also opportunities to learn from a wide range of cultures on matters of the balance between individual freedom and creativity, and responsibility to the community of others around us..

For the information of our readers, there is a conference “Towards a More Ethical Mayanist Archaeology” in November 2002 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Abstracts of presentations may be viewed at this web site -- http://ethical.arts.ubc.ca