On Contract Archaeology

Cristbal Gnecco & Adriana Schmidt

Dias

International Journal of Historical

Archaeology

ISSN 1092-7697
Volume 19
Number 4

Int J Histor Archaeol (2015) 19:687-698

DOI 10.1007/s10761-015-0305-6

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 Author's personal copy
Int J Histor Archaeol (2015) 19:687698
DOI 10.1007/s10761-015-0305-6

On Contract Archaeology

Cristbal Gnecco 1 & Adriana Schmidt Dias 2

Published online: 15 September 2015

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Abstract This paper reviews the main arguments used to justify and legitimize
contract archaeology worldwide. By seeing them contextually, however, those argu-
ments are stripped bare, unveiling their articulation with the logic of modernity and
capitalism. The paper examines them in the specific case of Brazil, only to draw general
conclusions thereafter.

Keywords Contract archaeology . Academic archaeology . Modernity . Capitalism .

Brazil

Introduction

The relationship between archaeology and development is old but has taken a new face
as the worldwide expansion of capitalism increased its pace in the last three decades.
That new faceknown as CRM in the United States and as CHM in other parts of the
Anglo worldis widely labeled as contract archaeology (CA, hereafter), a form of
relationship by which archaeology provides professional services to development
projects (highways, pipelines, power lines, dams, and the like). In order to deal with
the foreseen effect of capitalist expansion most countries enacted legislations aimed at
preventing the eventual loss of the archaeological heritage. Developers were thus
required to pay for mandatory professional assessments that would indicate if archae-
ological evidences were present in the areas to be intervened; if so, they were to be
investigated as much as possible. As a consequence, nowadays CA dominates archae-
ological practice worldwide.
CA is widely promoted and justified by its practitioners on four grounds: (a) it
enlarges the labor market of archaeologists by offering vast amounts of professional

* Cristbal Gnecco
cgnecco@unicauca.edu.co
Adriana Schmidt Dias
dias.a@uol.com.br
1
Department of Anthropology, Universidad del Cauca, Popayn, Colombia
2
Department of History, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
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opportunities; (b) it expands the understanding of the past by investigating an archae-

ological record unknown until its exposure by development projects, sometimes in
frontier areas where conventional research had not ventured for a myriad of reasons; (c)
it saves from definite loss an inevitably endangered heritage; and (d) it educates on
heritage issues (protection, stewardship, and the like), especially the local peoples
living near or around development projects. These arguments are quite feeble, though,
if seen through their modernity, that is, if seen contextually.
The expansion of the labor market is undeniable for CA has increased the availabil-
ity of professional and non-professional jobs by a significant number. Since its growth
is exponential (as capitalist expansion itself), it needs more archaeologists willing to
work in contract settings. This move has had harmful collateral effects. To begin with,
archaeological curricula (mostly at the undergraduate level) are transformed or created
to suit contract needs. CA has thus fostered profound curricular transformations,
something achieved by no other event in the history of the discipline. New undergrad-
uate programs, characterized by their short length and technical emphasis, are being
created to mass-produce the archaeologists demanded by contract companies. (Such a
technical emphasis, at the expense of a contextual education, is not just geared to a
more scientific intervention of archaeology in contract operations. In a truly modern
guise, it serves well the production of uncritical workers, fit to insert themselves in the
middle of a pyramidal structure in which they only provide a neutral and objective
service, determined and assessed by managers located way above them.) In the process
the ties between archaeology and anthropology, already weak, have been severed;
further, the possibility for the discipline to re-build its metaphysical and ontological
apparatus, already hierarchical and neocolonial, has been diminished, abating its critical
stance towards the global order. In spite of this training, it is not uncommon that
archaeology students drop out of school to enroll in contract companies (where salaries
are relatively good). In the (not unusual) case of contract companies owned and run by
academic archaeologists, it happens that the work force is mostly recruited among
students; they get paid, indeed, but the part of the lion goes to the owners of the
companies, creating an obscene situation in which the latter become capitalist entre-
preneurs which appropriate the surplus value produced by the former. This unique
situation has shamelessly transformed what previously was a purely academic relation-
ship into a capitalist one.
There is more to this issue and it has to do with the very existence of the market as
an inevitable event. Yet, it is a well-known historical fact that capitalism became the
dominant social-economic formation in the world due to the widespread creation of
markets (land market, labor market, commodities market, and the like). Its creation was
a deliberate, historical act, not an inevitable event. So deliberate it was that it demanded
immense and rapid transformations, masterfully depicted by Karl Polanyi (2001
[1944]). National governments engaged capitalist expansion by adopting policies that
transformed the political, social, and economic outlook of their communities.
(Ironically, such a transformation did away with the very conception of community
for it entrenched that of the individual, usually at odds with the former as with regards
to legal rights and basic moral values, such as solidarity and the common good.) A new
social pact had been forged (between society and capitalism), which replaced the pact
so cherished by the political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(between society and the government). At last, the argument on the expansion of the
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labor market is tautological: it expands because contract activities need archaeologists

but it also promotes contract activities by providing archaeologiststheir number
constantly increasing due to the very existence of the contract market.
The thorough promotion of the good CA archaeology does to the labor market
shouldnt it be stated the other way around, though, avoiding hypocrisy: the good
that the market does to CA?is usually complemented by less mundane, higher-
intentioned effects: the expanded understanding of an endangered past, and the fur-
thering of heritage education. As for the former, the argument posits that development
certainly threatens the past by threatening its material evidences (thus creating an
endangered past), but that it also allows an unprecedented opportunity to investigate
a past that would otherwise remain unexposed. The argument is, of course, also
tautological: development creates an endangered past that can be profitably studied
but that would not have to be studied had it not been endangered by development.
Besides, it does not face the very origin of the endangerment of the past (that is,
development) but accepts as a fact that it occurs and then it seeks to profit from the
situation. CA then becomes both an opportunistic partner and an accomplice of
development. In a long chain of naturalization CA accepts that development threatens
the archaeological record (the naturalized carrier of the past) because it is an unavoid-
able factas it is inevitable, natural, that the economy grows hand in hand with the
expansion of capital. The naturalization of the argument is so rude that it would be
laughable had it not such devastating consequences: if development endangers the past,
we better study it before it disappears.
The argument about heritage education posits that past evidences exposed by
development can be converted into heritage and then taught to local populations.
Heritage education programs linked to CA are booming as a means of countering the
critiques received from academia, especially regarding the inaccessibility of contract-
related findings and its isolation from various stakeholders, mostly local. Heritage
education programs have allowed CA to become socially responsiblean expression
formerly reserved to corporations, a symptom that archaeology has entered a corporate
phase. The arrogance, coloniality, and utter modernity of heritage education linked to
CA projects are obvious: they pretend that local populations are ignorant about their
pasts, which can only exist if exposed by the discipline (in the modern sense of
unearthing, unveiling, stripping, that is, digging); and they make heritage educators
the redeemers of the past, the history, and even the cultures of local populations. The
compensatory politics CA is engaging through heritage education is not politics for the
common good but plain and simple corporate politics. Corporate social responsibility, it
is worth recalling, is a one-way action by which capitalism gives back to the people
(normally local populations affected by development projects) whatever it deems worth
givingusually unimportant crumbs far removed from mitigating the social and
environmental harm caused by such projects. Social responsibility, as altruistic action,
acts along local resistance; while the former is widely publicized as good, the latter is
routinely criminalized and silenced. The co-existence of social responsibility and local
resistance and the uneven treatment they receive (in the media, in the legal systems, in
the administrative apparatus) highlights that the former supports and reproduces cap-
italism, which is disdainful of local struggles that challenge its operation.
Seeing the arguments that sustain CA this way and convinced that they needed a
thorough assessment capable of shaking a suspicious professional consensus (and
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silence), we convened a symposium on CA in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in June 2013.

Funded by the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), the Brazilian National
Research Council (CNPq), and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
(UFRGS), the symposium was designed to overtly gauge the relationship between
CA and capitalism. Our call to participate, widely circulated in the WAC listserv, was
intentionally provocative and stressed the lack of critical reflection on the part of
contract archaeologists mostly due to the fact that their practice has become a business.
Aggressive and negative responses soon followed, stating that our call attacked CA
(which it did!) and that it was elitist, biased, and non-professional. We genuinely tried
to find what provoked such a concerted burst of rage and concluded that it was because
we stated the business side of CA; because we mentioned its uncritical functionality
with development projects; and because we think that the fact that most archaeologists
worldwide work in contract settings has led the discipline to an uncritical, unreflecting
cul-de-sac, where social and political responsibilities are rare, to say the least.
From the start, we didnt want a balanced symposium. We wanted to position
ourselves before a practice that we believe has harmed archaeology, not to say the
lives of many peoples and the fate of nature. That is why the presenters we invited
(most of whom contribute papers to this issue as well) did not offer a balanced view but
the positioned perspective we believe best serves a critical, transformative reflection of
current archaeology. For the very same reason, this issue is not a balanced assessment
of CA. It is clearly biased in that none of the articles included defend it but take critical
stances against it, some of them rather radical. These pages do not feature celebratory
views of CA because we know full well the arguments they brandish and we reject
them.
We chose Porto Alegre as the symposiums venue for a powerful, symbolic reason:
the city hosted the first World Social Forum in 2001 (as well as four other editions), an
annual meeting of social organizations designed to discuss and offer alternatives to
development through a counter-hegemonic globalization. The first principle of its
charter states that The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective
thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of
experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil
society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and
any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed
towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth (http://
www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/main.php?id_menu=4&cd_language=2).
Accordingly, the ambitious aim of the symposium was to become a forum where the
complicity of archaeology with capitalist expansion could be challenged and
alternatives could be offered. We hope this issue can also fulfill the same role.

On Contract Archaeology: Minimal Notes

The first issue that comes to the fore when CA is probed is the relationship between the
discipline and modernity. Archaeology as a discipline unfolded in order to make time
transcendent (objective, neutral), to bring a collectivity (the national society) and a
singularity (the modern individual) to recognize each other as totality and part, and to
join them in a ceremonial, mnemonic space. Modern time served three functions: it was
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a measure of progress (society knew where it was, where it was going, and where it
came from); was a means of control (subjects had to adjust to a temporal behavior that
established an origin, a path, and a destination); and was a sign of a symbolic exchange
(between society and expert knowledge). Archaeology and modernity are tightly
linked; the origin of the former is intertwined with the fate of the latter. Their common
path has been forged by two Western philosophical underpinnings, teleology and
evolutionism, by virtue of which time has been universalized as having just one
direction and just one meaning.
CAs overt link with development, the contemporary offspring of the teleology of
Western time, furthers the long-standing relationship of archaeology with modernity. It
does not betray it. Besides, there is a purely disciplinary preoccupation linking the two:
the archaeological record. CAs almost exclusive commitment to the archaeological
record (its relationship to the public notwithstanding) operates as the ethical and
environmental pretext for the destruction of habitats and communities (Hamilakis
2007, p. 29). The archaeological record (but not people, communities, nature) is the
ultimate justification of CA and a long-standing interest of modern temporality.
Another link is the commodification of the past. Several scholarsfrom Fredric
Jameson to Zygmunt Bauman, from David Harvey to Beatriz Sarlo have long
posited that the commoditization of the past is a trademark of postmodernity, one of
its differences with any previous cultural logic. Indeed, if the relationship of archaeol-
ogy with modernity is as old as the discipline, it has changed in the last three decades:
from being instrumental in the provision of empirical data for supporting a progressive
temporality and a sense of identity, however defined, it has become a commoditized
form of practice, where material, knowledge, and heritage value are all translated into
economic value (Ferris and Welch 2014, p. 78). This commoditized form of practice,
alas, is neatly embodied in CA: everything involved in the trade (from the archaeolo-
gist, to the archaeological record, to the report, to the heritage education program)
circulates under the commodity form.
Finally, the relationship of archaeology with the politics of identity is as old as the
nation-state. That means that archaeological knowledge (scientific and otherwise) has
never been neutral but politically committed to any form of political-social agenda. The
bond of archaeology and development that creates CA is just another form the political
commitment of archaeology takes. The difference is that in this contract turn the
commitment is not primarily with a transcendent entity that represents the people
(i.e., the nation) but with a transcendent entity (the market) that controls politics and
society.
CA is a late offspring of current academic archaeology, not its bastard product, as it
has been routinely portrayed. Indeed, CA has long been criticized from academic
quarters, fustigating its lack of professional rigorthis claim is paradoxical, though,
because the wave of professionalization that has swept through the archaeological
establishment in the last two decades, especially in metropolitan countries, is clearly
linked to the growth and spread of CA (see Wylie 2002, p. 229)and scientific
standards, the poor accessibility of its findings, and the almost negligible publications
resulting from its works, to name a few. These critiques have created a schism: on one
side are the true, serious, and professional academic archaeologists; on the other, the
expedient, business-ridden, and opportunistic contract archaeologists. The schism can
be seen from a different perspective, however: on one side the pragmatic, heritage-
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committed, and devoted contract archaeologists; on the other the elitist, ivory-tower,
and anachronistic academic archaeologists. Any way you see it, the story of the good
and the bad has been recast. More importantly, the schism has had a lasting effect: it has
blurred the intimate relationship between academic and contract archaeology, veiling
that they partake of the same logic. After all, there are not many differences between the
two, in spite of their trumpeted divergences. It seems, therefore, that the emphasis on
their differences only seeks to isolate academic archaeology from the logic of capital,
throwing the dirty water into CA, which has then become a decoya quite useful
decoy, for that matter, because it also renders additional services, such as enlarging the
labor market. The deliberate character of this isolation also comes to the fore when the
great deal of hypocrisy involved is considered. It is often the case that academic
archaeologists do CA on the side, mostly as a means of earning an additional income,
as if nothing else were at stake. This apparent naivet, however, hampers their
possibility to speak up about (against?) CA since their hands are dirty (and not exactly
from dealing with dirt).
Surprisingly, most analyzes of CA have not abandoned this Manichean scenario, no
matter that its impact in the discipline in most countries is overwhelming. From the
academic side (and sometimes, even from within CA as well) the claims mostly urge
the adoption of better (scientific) standards in CA research, the democratization of the
contract market (avoiding the rampant monopoly enjoyed by large contract companies),
and the adoption of stern regulations at the institutional level. A much less frequent
claim calls for CA, especially in Indigenous lands, to submit to international canons,
such as Article 6 of International Labour Organizations Convention No. 169, which
calls for informed consultation. Although this may be considered a step in the right
direction (the direction of social justice), consultation is not a panacea in and of itself.
When implemented in development projects in which great amounts of money are at
stake (and, not surprisingly, transnational corporations are involved), consultation can
be a simulation of respect and democracy while only being a formality besieged by
corruption and threats. Even so, governments are increasingly seeing consultation as an
obstacle to swift development; yet, because it is an international obligation to the
signatories of ILOs Convention No. 169 (mostly Latin American countries), they are
finding ways to expedite its realization, transforming it into a mere bureaucratic
requisite that can be easily accommodated or circumvented. At any rate, the claims
to submit to international canons are all within the limits of disciplinary practice, that is,
CA is gauged and judged for what it is (or it is not) from a disciplinary, professional
perspective, usually tied to the rhetoric of scienceeven when ethics in CA practice are
at stake, usually discussed within disciplinary limits and within the scope of a reified
archaeological record. CA rarely (if ever) is gauged and judged from a contextual
perspective, as the papers in this issue attempt to do.
The non-reflexive complicity of most archaeologists with CA has created a public
space in which development demands archaeological expertiseas a means of appeas-
ing the vigilance of heritage protectors (themselves providers of capitalist/humanistic
products)and archaeology contractors readily provides it. In this perspective the
relationship between archaeology and capitalist expansion appears as an innocent
instrumentality, as a mere technical service. This innocence can be just seen as another
move in the widespread adoption of technical procedures in archaeology, offered as
disciplinary means to achieve representational certainty. But this disciplinary pretension
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helps to hide that they are linked to a pervasive and powerful cosmology, modernity. By
portraying research procedures as just mere technical operations in a cultural vacuum a
deliberate alienation on the part of the archaeologists has been created. By becoming
simple providers of technical services, supposedly autonomous (universal, neutral,
objective) from the context, the archaeologists have lost any traces of ontological
statusthey have become inanimate appendages of a gadgetry that exceeds in tech-
nique what it hides of ideology. In CA settings this alienation is even worse because it
seeks to separate the archaeologists from the immediate consequences in the social and
political arenas that their work has set in motionunlike academic archaeologists, the
consequences of whose work is often delayed in time and are therefore quite abstract.
Although contract and academic archaeology are much more widely linked than
normally admitted, there is an important difference between the two, however: CA has
moved the discipline from a basic concern with time to a basic concern with space. By
getting rid of the evidences of time in space, releasing the latter for development, CA
has created frictions that did not even exist before. This difference does not invalidate
but strengthens the intimate relationship between CA and archaeology at large, an
analysis of which was a purpose of the Porto Alegre symposiumwith Brazil as its
venue but also as its main focus because it experiences most of the serious problems
generated by CA. An experience-based account of CA-related events in Brazil throws
abundant light on the issues happening elsewhere. That is why the last three papers of
this issue are focused in Brazil. We deeply believe that the predicaments of CA in that
country are replicated elsewhere, no matter that at different scales. Thus, analyzes put
forward by these papers are a good place to engage wider reflections, a zoom in which
provides analytical elements for a subsequent and final zoom out.

Zooming In: Brazil

The end of the Cold War led in the 1990s to the dominance of neoliberal globalization.
In the new world order in transition, developing nations with autonomous political
projects and large territories and populations began to be considered emerging powers,
such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, grouped under the acronym
BRICS. BRICS now hold 26 % of the territory of the planet and 15 % of global GDP.
According to economic estimates, by 2050 BRICS would be richer than the G6
countries (USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan), concentrating 45 % of the
population and 25 % of global GDP. Current trends in global capitalism indicate that
China and India will be the dominant providers of technology and services, while
Brazil and Russia will be the largest providers of raw materials and foods (ONeill
2001; Wilson and Purushothaman 2003).
Since the turn of the millennium Brazilian foreign policy has undergone transfor-
mations geared to cope with the exhaustion of the neoliberal matrix of international
insertion. Neoliberal optimism was replaced in Lula da Silvas government (200311)
by criticism to asymmetric globalization and the search for strategic partners. To face
this new international conjuncture the Brazilian government launched the Growth
Acceleration Program (Programa de Acelerao do Crescimento, PAC) in 2007 to
boost economic growth. The basic component of PAC is infrastructure (sanitation,
housing, transport, energy, and hydroelectric resources), credit, improvement of the tax
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system, and adoption of long-term fiscal measures. Between 2007 and 2010 PAC
received $250 billion USD, aiming to achieve a GDP growth of 5 % per year (Silva
2013; Visentini 2013; Visentini and Silva 2010). Although the current global economic
crisis has slowed emerging economies it has not affected the development program
carried out in the last decade.
As in most countries, PAC development projects have to go through environmental
licensing, a component of which is the archaeological assessment of the areas to be
intervened. PAC projects have thus expanded the job market for Brazilian archaeolo-
gists in an unprecedented way. Currently well over 95 % of active archaeologists in
Brazil are engaged in CA projects. Linked to a booming capitalism and its resultant
infrastructural works, contract archaeologists have lost independence and critical ca-
pacity and have agreed with development projects that negatively impact human
populations as well as the rights of nature. Further, CA is rapidly transforming curricula
and even charting disciplinary paths. As elsewhere in the world, CA in Brazil is linked
to capitalist expansion; as elsewhere in the world, its exponential growth can only be
understood contextually.
Under the ideology of growth, that implies that the economy behaves much like a
living organism, PAC-related projects have moved forward, disregarding whatever
stands on their way. In the process, the rights of peoples and nature have been violated
outright. In a country eager for development and moving forward to accelerate its pace
of economic growth is not surprising that one of the most pressing issues is increasing
the production of energy. As a result, massive hydroelectric dams have been construct-
ed or are currently under construction. (One of them, Belo Monte, besieged by conflicts
of all sorts that halted its construction for years, is moving ahead at full speed. When
completed, it will be one of the largest in the world in terms of installed capacity.) The
large areas most of them flood happen to be in Indigenous and peasant lands and in the
Amazon basin. Their construction, therefore, severely impacts thousands of peoples
and thousands of hectares of the fragile Amazonian ecosystem. This situation was
denounced some years ago by Zhouri and Oliveira (2007), who noted the sheer
inequality of the forces struggling for or against the dams, creating a situation in which
socially unjust and environmentally unsustainable policies are perpetuated, for the
riverine communities fight against a reifying logic that turns them into objects in the
natural landscape (Zhouri and Oliveira 2007, p. 120). Violence has frequently
erupted, as the affected communities react against the construction projects, with the
consequent intervention of police forces to protect the interest of the electric sector.
PAC projects have been mired in conflict and violence. In this scenario academic
disciplines have been brought to the fore. While some (such as anthropology and
political science, and even hard-sciences such as biology) take sides for the defense of
life, solidarity, and welfare, archaeology has not. Its silence has been created, for the
most part, by its uncritical, instrumental relationship with development.
The most telling case occurred in the mid-2000s around a huge dam being built in
the Culuene River, in the Amazon basin. Besides the devastating environmental effect
resulting from the construction of the dam, the rights (traditional and otherwise) of the
Indigenous peoples inhabiting the area were violated. In 2004, the local Indigenous
inhabitants found that the dam was already under construction without any previous
hearings, in utter disregard of ILOs Convention 169, ratified by Brazil in 2002. (This
seems to be a common practice of the Brazilian government. The current construction
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of Belo Monte was also started conducting no hearings with the local Indigenous
population. See: http://amazonwatch.org/news/2012/0307-ilo-says-brazil-violated-
convention-169-in-belo-monte-case.) They moved swiftly and seized the works,
arguing that a most sacred site was to be flooded and fish resources (on which they
largely depend) affected. After long legal battles to stop or impel construction, Culuene
received the approval of the Brazilian environmental agency. Determinant in the
approval was the concept issued by a CA company stating that the sacred site the
Indigenes were fighting for was elsewhere. Anthropologist Carlos Fausto (n.d., 2006)
fustigated the approval of Culuene on environmental and cultural grounds but also the
concept issued by the CA company, noting profound deficiencies when not overt
mistakes. Further, he asked: Which public mechanisms prevent the production of a
vicious circle between entrepreneurs and consulting firms? What should be the role of
government agencies and scientific associations in this process? (Fausto 2006, p. 8).
After entertaining the answers to his own questions, he stated: I can only conclude,
once again, that in the science of contract the most important part is the contract and not
the science Or is it that in Brazil contract [archaeology] became an end in itself?
(Fausto 2006, pp. 12, 14). The Culuene case exposed the utter tautology in which,
usually and for economic convenience, CA is currently trapped: the constructing
company needed to prove in the tribunals that no Indigenous sacred sites were to be
impacted by the project. In order to do so it hired a CA company to provide the
information it needed to sustain its claim. Alas, the CA company stated that no
Indigenous sacred sites were to be impacted by the project! This is so because CA
firms respond, more often than not, to the pressures and interests of the party they work
for. By doing so, CA firms not only betray the rights of different communities
(Indigenous and otherwise) and of nature but also the very supreme interest they
supposedly strive to protect: the archaeological record. The latter is compromised
whenever and wherever development is at stake, unveiling that it is development that
sets the fate of the archaeological recordbut rarely the other way around, as CA
practitioners often argue when defending their independence and professional integrity.
Development becomes the ultimate arbiter and the transcendent/immanent entity that
decides over the fate of animate and inanimate beingsincluding the archaeologists,
the archaeological record, and the past it supposedly embodies.
In the wake of these events Fausto (n.d.) called for the Brazilian Anthropological
Association (ABA) and for the Brazilian Archaeological Society (SAB) to begin a
profound discussion about what he called contract science and its many implica-
tions. Surprisingly, the latter has remained conspicuously silent to this date. (Except for
the Position note in solidarity with the peoples of the Tapajs basin, adopted at the
meeting of the Northern Chapter held in Macap in August 2014. Although it is
specific and non-comprehensive, it may indicate a change of direction in the political
consciousness of the SAB. See: http://www.sabnet.com.br/informativo/view?TIPO=
1&ID_INFORMATIVO=247). This may be related to the fact that contract
companies and the development corporations they serve sponsor the SAB bi-annual
meetings and other of its activities, to a certain extent influencing their contents, and to
the fact that most SAB members work for contract companies. CA-related findings are
frequently presented in SAB meetingswhich become, in this way, academic forums
for legitimating contractual practicesbut critical reflections on the sociopolitical
implications of CA are absent.
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Another area where CA has left its imprint in Brazil is heritage education, widely
promoted as a way to open and legitimate academic spaces for a community-engaged
disciplinary practice, as a way to educate the public in matters that only archaeology is
supposed to foster. Yet, to open and legitimate academic spaces for community-
engaged archaeology while at the same time providing professional services to devel-
opment companies that violate all kinds of rights is not contradictory but cynical. (Belo
Monte is, once again, the scenario that illustrates this paradox because of the recent
promotion of a site-school to be held there to train students in field archeology,
criticized in an open letter signed by several academic archaeologists. See: http://www.
cartacapital.com.br/sustentabilidade/a-destruicao-em-belo-monte-virou-atracao-o-sitio-
escola-3109.html). It also is an expression of the corporate phase archaeology has
entered, in which social responsibility stands out. This cynicism, mixed with
corporate ideology, has gone unnoticed or has been received with a complacent
silence, especially as some of its perpetrators have managed to infiltrate institutional
and academic spaces. Indeed, the complicity between academia and contract companies
is notorious in Brazil. In spite of the critiques to CA coming from academic circles, the
fact is that some company owners, partners, or employees also work in academic
settings. The situation worsens when those very individuals also hold positions in the
institutions responsible for establishing academic policies at the national level. The
result of this dreadful mix is simple: Brazil has witnessed a literal explosion of new,
highly technical undergraduate programs (Bezerra 2008; Schaan 2009), clearly
destined to train the many archaeologists the contract market eagerly needs.
In this new professional context the National Historical and Artistic Heritage
InstituteInstituto do Patrimnio Histrico e Artstico Nacional (IPHAN)is respon-
sible for ensuring the mediation between the interests of entrepreneurs and their
compliance to heritage legislation. However, the quality control of CA (i.e., archae-
ology governed by the logic of capital) is performed according to the criteria of
efficiency of contract companies, usually committed to meeting the schedules of the
projects they were hired for. The importance of CA for development is so sensitive (for
it can stop the construction of infrastructure) that its management by IPHAN is under
close governmental surveillance, especially regarding the research being carried out in
what the government considers crucial development projects. Moreover, in recent years
the developmental agenda created a technocratic machine that controls archaeological
research and consolidated authoritarian institutional practices, including the emergence
of legal loopholes that allow companies to dispense with CA, delegating on them the
final decision on what it is to be preserved.
(In this sense see the Interministerial Resolution No. 60 of March 24, 2015, and the
Normative Instruction No. 01 of the following day: http://portal.iphan.gov.br.)

Zooming Out: Disentangling Contract Archaeology

The situation of CA in Brazil we just described serves to zoom out our arguments, to
make them general. To begin with, it calls for the disentanglement of the relationship of
CA with the wider context in which it operates. For disentangling contract archaeology
we need to perform its vivisection; by it we mean exactly what the on-line Merriman-
Webster Dictionary states about the word: The cutting of or operation on a living
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2015) 19:687698 697

animal usually for physiological or pathological investigation. Archaeology is a living

animal and the task we have set forth to accomplish seeks to expose its pathologies,
among which its complicity with capitalism and development ranks high. A character-
istic of this pathology is the reification and commoditization of the archaeological
record and, by epistemological extension, of the past it embodies. The past (along its
spatial locus) becomes a thing and a commodity that are traded, measured, boxed, and
disposed.
The naivet of portraying CA as a mere technical servicewhich underscores the
fact that most curricular transformations designed to suit contract needs are geared to
technicalities of all sortsdisguises its commitment to development. We can even push
the argument further to state that CA pretends to be autonomous from contextual
conditions given that it merely provides a technical expertise. Yet, as the Brazilian
case we summarily reviewed indicates, CA research more often than not responds to
development needs, compromising its independence and its purported academic auton-
omy. Further, an ideological distortion is created when socio-environmental sustain-
ability (which includes temporal sustainability, so to speak) really is capitalist
sustainability, among which corporate social responsibility plays a leading role,
having CA as an important support through heritage education.
Disentangling CA is a first step to undo the maladies it has helped to produce, surely
to archaeology but also to society and nature at large. This necessary step can be
complemented with a political activism aiming to face the conception of development
as a non-historical master trope and CA as a technical, decontextualized activity. This
call for activism is on line with what Gustavo Esteva (1996, p. 73) called post-
economic forms based on networks of knowledge and action, coalitions of citizens
for implementing political controls in the economy in order to reinsert economic
activities into the social fabric from where they were rhetorically extracted in order
to make them accountable to no one. It is about time to make CA accountable to society
and nature, not to say to archaeology and its practitioners.

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