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Ethics and remote sensing in archaeology - Ep 161
261 Plays4 years ago
When you fly your drone over a landscape or use satellite images in your research, do you ever thing about the people that live on and use the land that you're studying? Because of the scale of the images you might not be able to see actual people, but they're there. In a recent paper, Dylan Davis and Tanambelo Rasolondrainy, two of the authors and our guests today, explore the ethics of remote sensing and collaboration with stakeholders.
Links
- Phys.org article
- Archaeological Prospection article
- Article on Academia.edu
- ArchaeoTech Episode 86
- Streisand Effect
- Toward a just and inclusive environmental archaeology of southwest Madagascar
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
ArchPodNet
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- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Sponsorship Announcement: Zencastr
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
Episode Introduction: Ethics in Remote Sensing
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archiotech Podcast, Episode 161. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss ethics in remote sensing and other activities with Dylan Davis and Nadu Rosulin-Driny. Let's get to it.
Paul's Return to New York
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to episode 161 of the Archiotech podcast. Paul, how's it going back in New York? Yeah, back home after that about month out west. It was a great experience and it's good to be back home right now. I'm just taking care of things, getting settled back in and
00:00:50
Speaker
looking forward to what this new chapter of my life is going to be. How are you doing, Chris?
CRM Project and Archaeology Insights
00:00:54
Speaker
I'm doing good. Now that you're done with your first CRM project, you're officially a shovel bum because now you're just waiting to go to your next CRM project. So there you go. Exactly. Looking forward to it too. Exactly.
00:01:05
Speaker
Yeah, we left Nevada. We're still in the smoke, unfortunately, but we left Nevada and we were in southeastern Washington for a few days. We found out that the Tri-Cities area of Washington where Kennewick Man was found, that's one of the cities. You know, fans of archeology might know who Kennewick Man is. Apparently, this is an actually interesting discussion.
Missoula Floods and Washington's Geography
00:01:24
Speaker
Because of the Missoula floods that happened pretty much every ice age, it's just these huge ice dams get built up in essentially the Rockies.
00:01:33
Speaker
As the ice melts, when the ice dam breaks, it flooded the Columbia Plateau with minerals and water and created all these different canals and gorge systems and all kinds of stuff. There's this one area in the Tri-Cities that apparently has this mineral-rich area called Red Mountain, and it's its own viticultural area. There's not too many AVAs in the United States, but there's like 40 wineries in this one area, and the Reds are just insane.
00:01:58
Speaker
That's where we were for the last few days. Now we're up in Northeastern Washington. So all right.
Ethics in Remote Sensing Article Overview
00:02:05
Speaker
Well, let's move on. And Paul, you found an article and contacted a couple of people that helped write this article. And that's what we're going to talk about, ethics and remote sensing. So let's introduce Dylan Davis and Nadeau Rasul Indrani. I probably said that wrong, Nadeau, even though I practice it. But Rasul Indrani.
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah, so I ran across on my newsfeed, fizz.org, linked to an article in archaeological perfection by a suite of different people, and Dylan, who'd actually been on this podcast back in episode 86, talking about LIDAR work that he was doing in the Southeast US,
00:02:51
Speaker
was the primary author. I reached out to Dylan and he agreed to come on. It's a great topic. Actually, I'm glad that, Chris, that you brought up Kennewick Man because Kennewick Man in the US context is really important because of
00:03:07
Speaker
how it forced us to change our laws and adapt to how we deal with descendant communities in the US. It couldn't just be archaeologists deciding that they could use human remains, in that case, however they wanted, but had to bring in consultation and coordination with various Native American groups. And that relates then to this article in particular.
Why Are Ethics Important in Remote Sensing?
00:03:30
Speaker
It's the aerial panopticon and the ethics of archaeological remote sensing in sacred cultural spaces. It tickled my fancy when I saw that because in most of our recent podcast episodes, we've brought up the issues of ethics in archaeology and ethics in digital archaeology.
00:03:49
Speaker
And there seems to be a growing consensus in our field that people have to be people by archaeologists, researchers have to be thinking ethically about how they're using data, what the relationships are to local indigenous and descendant communities and so on. And that's exactly what this article tackles. So Dylan, how did you come to this topic?
Ethical Challenges in Madagascar
00:04:11
Speaker
So this really came out of several different things, but among them is my project that I'm focusing on for my dissertation in Madagascar, where this particular research is focused. And my work, as you know, since I've been on this program before, is a lot of remote sensing focused research. And in Madagascar, I've been doing similar things, not with LIDAR, but with a lot of satellite-based remote sensing.
00:04:38
Speaker
And in the course of conducting this work, and then through discussions within the lab that I'm a part of, that Nadeau is a member of and that my advisor leads, we kind of were starting to realize that a lot of this work, we have the capacity to see things in a way that
00:04:54
Speaker
may not even necessarily be welcomed by many communities that we are researching. There are places that are taboo, that are very sacred, that outsiders are not supposed to see. And yet, because of the bird's eye view, we get with a lot of these technologies, some of them, especially drones, you can see
00:05:12
Speaker
everything and that can potentially invade privacy as well as violate the wishes of local communities that we are trying to work with as closely as possible and respect their wishes of them in all the other ways that we do research. But suddenly looking at their land from thousands of miles away, we can do things without necessarily having to communicate with them at all. And we thought this is a really big problem that we really need to think more about before we do this kind of work.
00:05:40
Speaker
Let me mention real quick, Dylan, you mentioned you were on the program before. We should have said that at the top. You were on episode 86, and the episode title is Using Math and Maps to Find Mounds in the Southeastern US. So that was a pretty cool episode. We're going to link to that in the show notes for this episode. So if you want to go hear Dylan talk about that, then check it out. But I think a good analogy for people, because I've talked to people about drone work and aerial stuff a lot, right?
00:06:07
Speaker
They often just don't get some of the privacy concerns and they're like, what are you talking about? This is either prehistoric or it's blah, blah, blah. It's whatever. It's like, yeah, well, somebody's concerned about it. And I always equate it to you get your first drone, even a small one, and you're in your backyard and your backyard is fenced and you know, your neighbors, everything's cool. But the minute you lift that drone over the fence and now you're looking at them with a camera, it's weird again.
00:06:28
Speaker
Now, it's just strange. That's a small example of that, right? But this is on a much larger scale with whole societies and civilizations. Absolutely. It's a silly example of privacy, but how many news reports did you see when people started getting their own personal drones of some neighbor shooting their neighbor's new drone toy out of the sky with a shotgun?
Privacy Concerns with Drones
00:06:53
Speaker
It was a regular news article repeated.
00:06:57
Speaker
every month or two for about a year, four or five years ago. And yeah, that's personal privacy, which is certainly to be taken care of. But the point of this article, as I understood it, was actually not just personal privacy, which is definitely important, but also respecting cultural norms and bringing in
00:07:20
Speaker
you know, the point of view of the people that you're actually studying or on whose lands you're working.
00:07:36
Speaker
When you talk about privacy, you talk about your compound, your backyard and your house and your car, something like that. But in another country like Madagascar, for example, where I come from, in the rural area, people are having a different way of looking at what you have. It's not just your house or your backyard and your car, but
00:08:04
Speaker
It's the whole answer because everything is communal,
Cultural Views on Land Ownership in Madagascar
00:08:07
Speaker
you know.
00:08:08
Speaker
And people in a village don't see like what you own there is not mine. Like when you go to a farm, for example, you invite everybody to work on your farm and they don't pay them. But because they are going to invite you also like to work on your farm. So the whole landscape itself is like belonging to the community.
00:08:36
Speaker
So people are not seeing like they own a land, they own a house. They feel like they own, I mean, the land own them. This is a kind of like a difference between how scholars from the West see privacy thing and the people like in a country like Madagascar, in the rural Madagascar, see like what their privacy is. So this makes this article that we,
00:09:06
Speaker
Therefore right in the land like really important because sometimes people think like
00:09:14
Speaker
It's because you're not like recording people or someone's compound, someone's house. Then you think like you're not like jeopardizing or intruding their privacy. But people think like the whole landscape and you can't really tell which landscape belongs to which village until you ask. So this makes this paper really interesting.
00:09:41
Speaker
Yeah, and going off of what Nadeau just said, when I was in Madagascar a few years ago conducting fieldwork, I work with a team of local Malagasy archaeologists. All of us in Madagascar within our lab work with the Marumbé Archaeology Project team.
00:10:02
Speaker
When I went there to do all of my work, what I was testing was actually a remote sensing model that predicts where archaeological sites are located and where people have lived on the landscape over hundreds to thousands of years. And when we were actually going out into the field to survey, there were many instances where, because we were working with the local communities, we were told, oh, we can't actually visit that spot. It's sacred. It's off limits.
Communication with Local Communities
00:10:29
Speaker
we don't go there or at least foreigners cannot go there. And so that's also kind of where I started to realize a lot of this stuff, which is extremely important, but you don't necessarily even notice it until you're in communication with local communities and are really introduced to different cultural norms and practices. Because if we weren't in consultation with local communities, we would have been trespassing on these sacred grounds. But because we were
00:10:58
Speaker
in really close communication, we could realize, okay, maybe the remote sensing found something there, we shouldn't be going anywhere near it though. And that was not even using drones, that was just satellite data. So you can't even necessarily see people, just like Nada was saying, it's not necessarily that people are being invaded in their privacy, it's the landscape as a whole. And how different components of that landscape hold very specific and very intimate meaning.
00:11:27
Speaker
And this reminds me of something I heard in a GIS class in grad school called the Streisand Effect. Barbara Streisand basically has a house or had a house in Malibu, California, right on the cliffs there, an iconic house right there on the cliffs. And they were
00:11:42
Speaker
somebody was doing a report on coastal erosion and they took a whole series of photographs along the area there, like really detailed photographs and basically published this in a paper on coastal erosion in an attempt to get like a baseline and then monitor erosion through time. Well, some of her lawyers or somebody found out and she tried to get it suppressed because she didn't want pictures of her house out there. Well, like probably a hundred people would have read this paper, but since she threw a fit about it, like millions of people saw it.
00:12:10
Speaker
because of her picture that her house was now published in the whole thing. And that's the Streisand effect just because, not just because it was published, but because a big deal was made about it. So when you're talking about exposing somebody's cultural assets, be they mountain ranges or even whole landscapes or whatever it is, you know, you might think, well, I'm just, you know, a lowly archeologist putting a paper out over here. But I mean, to be honest, this could get picked up. This could, you know, something could happen. And all of a sudden they're getting all this undue attention. And
00:12:40
Speaker
they really need to be aware that that's a possibility from an ethical standpoint. Absolutely. Yeah. And what I'm struck with actually is what Nadeau was saying about the use of land and the delineation of land. I mean, that's something that we Westerners often think of. This land is owned by the state. This land is owned by this person. This land is owned by this person. And that does not map well to many, many different communities around the world.
00:13:07
Speaker
We definitely have that knowledge of that within Europeans coming to what is now the United States and trading things for land, which is probably a very incomplete understanding on the part of the traders of what they were exchanging. They were thinking they were buying plots of land and the people with whom they were exchanging were maybe
00:13:31
Speaker
giving certain use to it at certain times, but not actual ownership of it. So, varied ways of looking at landscapes I think is really important. And tough. I mean, tough without the communication that you're talking about, the collaboration really with local indigenous descent communities.
00:13:49
Speaker
I think it's very crucial, but it's very important that archaeologists are recognizing those, I mean, acknowledging that there is such kind of thing going on in another culture, I would say. And if we have a kind of like,
00:14:10
Speaker
way of thinking from here, because I think that's what we call an ethic, a norm that you have to follow, a rule that you have to follow from a certain circle where you lead, then if you just impose that rule and norms of yours from the waste to another culture somewhere, where they have also their own rules, they have also their own ethics, then there is a clash there, there is a conflict there.
00:14:39
Speaker
So in order to avoid such kind of conflicts, you need to kind of like acknowledge that there is also another rule here and we need a kind of permission. And that permission you cannot just like get from anywhere, but from the local people themselves.
00:15:00
Speaker
All right. Well, that sounds like a good spot to take a break because we have a lot more to talk about and we're going to shift gears a little bit on the other side. So we will be back in just a minute. Chris Webster here for the archeology podcast network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zen caster. That's Z E N C A S T R.
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00:16:32
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to The Architect Podcast, episode number 161. Today, we're talking to Dylan Davis and Nadeau Rasulindrani. They are two of the authors on a recent article entitled, The Aerial Panopticon and the Ethics of Archaeological Remote Sensing in Sacred Cultural Spaces.
00:16:48
Speaker
And Nadeau, right at the end of the last segment, you were talking about permissions and understanding between people. And what this gets to, I think, and it certainly is highlighted in the intro to the article, is this gets to power dynamics,
Power Dynamics in Remote Sensing
00:17:04
Speaker
right? This is really the framework that this article is discussing the ethics of remote sensing. Do you or Dylan want to give our listeners a little intro to what you're thinking about this?
00:17:18
Speaker
So yeah, the framing that we kind of took with this paper was really, as the panopticon probably hints as we looked at this from the lens of basically Foucaultian power dynamics, looking at the use of either satellites or aerial photography as a
00:17:37
Speaker
you know, bird's eye view into the lives of other people where you can see them and what they're doing, but they can't see you. And sometimes in some cases with satellites, for example, they're not even aware that you're watching them. And so this really this strikes at this panopticon kind of analogy, which it's been made before, but not very consistently in archaeological work. There's been a couple of papers in the past few years that have started to point this out.
00:18:04
Speaker
And really what it kind of gets to, and I think there's actually a figure in the article that in a lot of cases when we use these technologies, it's scholars in the Western world or just academics in general in our ivory towers that are looking at the satellite data or are flying our drone and analyzing our images, but completely separate in many ways from the communities that we're studying.
00:18:28
Speaker
But we were realizing, especially with what we were discussing before, is this can have very bad consequences if you're not really sharing what you're doing and people maybe aren't even aware they're being filmed or recorded or anything until it's too late. So what we kind of argue for in this paper is that these kinds of technologies, especially those where you can see really important things,
00:18:52
Speaker
that might be considered sacred or might be private if that kind of disconnect exists where you're doing this work, it's important to consult with local communities. And so rather than just analyzing this on your own and then going in later and asking for permission to dig or survey,
00:19:12
Speaker
we kind of argue that you should really be analyzing these with permission of communities and looking at these data sets with local communities, not just apart from them until you want to do something. So all of this kind of gets into how we frame this notion of power dynamics. And by shifting the focus from just us looking at other people
00:19:38
Speaker
the academic or the archaeologist looking at a landscape. It's the academic and the local community looking at the data together to then study this landscape.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah, dynamic is right. Actually, this power of dynamic is not just like something that happens recently with remote sensing, which is a new technology.
Avoiding Harm in Remote Sensing
00:20:01
Speaker
I mean, a recent technology that is applied to a developing world like Madagascar, but it has been like happening with another field.
00:20:12
Speaker
but we at least like for other fields like let's say this like archaeology in general at least we have already like recognized that missing link between the scholars from especially the scholars from the waste to the local community in a developing country but
00:20:37
Speaker
for this specific topic, the remote sensing in our activity.
00:20:43
Speaker
The problem is like, because we are like, can always access to those data, whether we have a permission or not, then we tend to just like go on and do our research and analyze, right? But there are some like very sensitive information that you are like exposing.
00:21:10
Speaker
And I think if you are really doing science, which is the search for knowledge for the development of the society, then you have to be careful. Because are you doing science to just further your career?
00:21:33
Speaker
advancement or are you doing a science, but at the same time, you're harming the local people unintentionally, maybe. And that's the point of the difficult. We are not really like blaming the remote sensing archaeologists.
00:21:53
Speaker
But we are just trying to let them know that there is this kind of issue that we may have overlooked while we are in the field or while we are doing our research. And we may not really realize the impact of it, but if it's not harmful, maybe it's insidious. In a gradual way, it may become harmful to the
00:22:23
Speaker
local people. So the point here is just like to encourage archaeologists, especially the remote sensing archaeologists, to think about what they're doing. Are they really doing science for, you know, search for knowledge and at the same time for the development of the society? Or are they causing a harmful something to the society? They're studying.
00:22:53
Speaker
I think that's fascinating that you're using the word of harm here because I don't think I've heard that in discussions yet about ethics and archaeology. And I think that even the most, what, the worst researcher out there who's doing something just for his own aggrandizement doesn't really want to harm the community he's studying. Most people have some sort of respect or even love for the communities that they're studying. So framing it as
00:23:21
Speaker
harm avoidance, I think is really interesting. Dylan, you just had your hand up, so hopefully you have some more to offer on that notion. One of the things that I was going to say going off of what Nadeau was talking about was that in a lot of cases, the things that we talk about in this article are things that
00:23:40
Speaker
are very well established in archaeology more generally, community-based approaches, making sure that you're working closely with indigenous groups and descended communities. But the piece that always seems to get left out, or at least isn't really talked about, is when we use digital techniques. So I don't think anybody these days would disagree that you shouldn't go into somebody's backyard or into somebody's homeland and just start digging up
00:24:08
Speaker
random things without talking to people or trespassing on different property. But when you talk about it in terms of remote work, the implication is usually that, oh, there is no harm because you don't touch anything. It's remote. You can't harm anybody or anything from looking at things from afar. But to Nadeau's point, there can be harm that's done. And photographs have done quite a lot of harm in many ways, whether it's
00:24:37
Speaker
In surveillance, you spy on another country or a group, and that can give you intel that can potentially help out in a war, but that obviously hurts people on the other side of that, and in anthropology as well, and archaeology.
00:24:53
Speaker
images have been used in all sorts of ways to paint people as savages versus civilized. And so even though this may not be exactly the same, it has those same potential ramifications, especially when we are doing work that potentially
00:25:09
Speaker
could perhaps implicate people in something that they are not responsible for. If we're using these big data sets to trace deforestation or some kind of major ecological event and suddenly we've done all this work, we haven't talked to any local communities and somehow our research ends up
00:25:27
Speaker
pinning the blame on some local group when, in reality, that's not the case at all if we had bothered to ask and get their input before writing these things up.
Impact of Misconduct in Remote Sensing
00:25:38
Speaker
This, I think, is how, when you don't converse and the power dynamic is imbalanced, this is how you can cause potential harm using these kinds of technologies. Even when the data is available or even if it's not, these can cause long-term effects.
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think
00:25:59
Speaker
what they are not saying is clear. But what I want to explain is why is it really harmful to the local people? We may think some of us, because we are studying science. I, for myself, because I am indigenous people, but I have a really learned science, then I know some of those things might be considered in those like, oh, these are just like mumbo-jumbo things.
00:26:29
Speaker
But those people, the local people themselves, they believe in those things. And all their life, since they were born, until they die, they rely on those sacred place. And they're hiding some of them. And even the neighboring societies sometimes, it's not only the school earth, are not allowed to go to some places.
00:26:57
Speaker
which are considered like taboo, for example. And for the neighboring communities, they think like, wow, they have the power because they have this sacred place, something like that. And they think like there's something going on there, you know? And for you, as a scholar from the West, just exposing that like, hey, there's nothing there but just forest and trees and something like that.
00:27:25
Speaker
It's like destroying the whole essence of the society. The values that makes the society bond together is the one that you are hitting them. And you're telling the other people around them or the other people from the Westworld, from other area,
00:27:51
Speaker
But actually, that area, that so-called sacred land, there's nothing really like a supernatural going on there. It's just a tease and stones and grasses. And just amazing, there'll be parts of that.
00:28:09
Speaker
to the, like, the status of the people, that group. You are geo-paradising. You are a kind of, like, transgressing event, I would say. The holiness of that lane, because you are, like, exposing them to the world that they're just, like, believing in a mumbo jump or something like that. And I think that's really harmful.
00:28:33
Speaker
No, that makes a lot of sense. You use the word power again. And to wrap back to the discussion about power and the power dynamic between the researchers and the local communities, one quote that I'm just going to pull out of the article that really jumped out to me was,
00:28:50
Speaker
quote, to put more bluntly, we're implying that power must be seeded by researchers who have hitherto held it, which I think gets to the crux of it. We had Parker Van Falkenberg on this podcast a couple of times, and once he was talking about remote sensing data that he was doing in coastal South America.
00:29:10
Speaker
he referred to it as problematic and that he was having to work with indigenous communities because of the God's eye view. Even more so than the bird's eye view, which is what you've used in this article, the God's eye view, which really implies a lot of that power dynamic. A bird doesn't have necessarily a lot of power, but by definition, a God does.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, seeding the power though is difficult because especially as researchers well steeped in a Western tradition, you would think that if you seed that power to somebody else, you end up with worse research.
Why Collaborate with Local Communities?
00:29:50
Speaker
How do you address that kind of a concern? I mean, at least from my experience is
00:29:58
Speaker
You always wind up, I think, with better research, the more collaborative it is, because when you look at something from only one perspective, you're steeped in that perspective and you kind of get stuck. No one ever has all the answers, and obviously,
00:30:14
Speaker
Everyone is trying to become more interdisciplinary and reaching across the aisle within academia where geographers and anthropologists and biologists and computer scientists are all trying to work on these big projects. That's often the big nature and science papers that everyone talks about, but it goes beyond interdisciplinary in terms of within academia or within research.
00:30:40
Speaker
institutions, it also has to do with integrating local perspectives, indigenous perspectives, because there's information that academics and Western scientists just don't have. And if you were to ask any of us, we will guess, but we don't know. But if you go and talk to local communities about these things, because it has to do with their homes,
00:31:05
Speaker
they're going to have a lot of these answers that you're looking for. All you really have to do is ask. So I guess going back to the initial question, it would be, I would disagree with the premise that seeding some authority back and having these conversations would dampen the research in any way. I think it only enhances it. No, that makes sense. Yeah. I just want to say,
00:31:30
Speaker
I think we need to look at what's going on in different classes, different perspectives, like our perspectives as scholars, but also what is the perspectives of the local people? Because when you are
00:31:54
Speaker
showing to quote uneducated people, very sophisticated devices and technology like that, they will never understand.
00:32:10
Speaker
What's this? And not only the good sides, but they do not understand what's going on. But as long as you got the permission from the local authorities,
00:32:27
Speaker
which is the government uh representatives then they'll just like okay uh if you got that permission for permits from uh the the government then you can just like host it but it's always important to explain to them and i think that's the the important part of the paper like it's always important to explain to the local people like what
00:32:57
Speaker
are you going to do? And what kind of device are you going to use? What are those devices are doing? What they what those device can do? And what are you going to use those data from those devices?
00:33:13
Speaker
And what is the benefits of the Noho people from the results of your research? I think those are very crucial thing to settle before anything can start in the field. We got such kind of like conversation between researchers and Noho people.
00:33:37
Speaker
You end up being codified. I don't know if that's a word. You become like a God. Because I was once one of them. Then another word, when we see those people from outside,
00:33:55
Speaker
especially the foreigners, when they come to our place, then we always think like, oh, they're like a good like people. There are some people, but they're good like people. And I think when you start to explain like what you're doing, and there is a kind of misconception. I mean, it's a kind of like a colonial relics.
00:34:20
Speaker
that we are still inheriting today, to show them how different we are, instead of showing how similar we are, but we are just from different countries. I think that's something that we are missing to explain sometimes in the field. But if you acknowledge that local peoples also
00:34:44
Speaker
have knowledge. It's just different from your knowledge because what you believe is science, what they believe is whatever they believe in the field. But if you acknowledge that knowledge is knowledge, whether it's from the scientific society or it's from the local society, then you can have a conversation.
00:35:09
Speaker
And they can always understand what's going on. If you try to understand, if you try to explain in their language, like this thing I'm doing is like this and like this. So I think the takeaway from this is like, we need to like try to converge.
00:35:33
Speaker
all those knowledge. And we shouldn't, as a scientist, we shouldn't just like rely on the science part that we are learning from the university. We shouldn't just rely on the knowledge from the science that we learn from the university, but those people also, the indigenous knowledge also is a science. If we can acknowledge that, then we can make more, I mean, we can
00:36:03
Speaker
further knowledge, the knowledge of the world.
00:36:07
Speaker
You both make a very compelling case for increasing the amount of knowledge that we bring to our questions, increasing the number of voices to make for better research, to make for more just and equitable research too. But of course, we need to know where the rubber meets the road, how we actually go about doing that in the field.
Adapting Ethics to Contexts and Scales
00:36:27
Speaker
So how we take a break right now and we can address the practical considerations of bringing in local indigenous communities, voices in collaboration with our research when we come back from the break.
00:36:39
Speaker
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00:37:00
Speaker
Welcome back to this very interesting discussion on the Architect Podcast, Episode 161. This is our final segment, and since it's our final segment, we're going to wrap up this discussion. Something that has really been rattling around in my brain, and Paul alluded to it at the end of the last segment as to where we're going to go, but
00:37:18
Speaker
I'm thinking if we're talking about huge landscape studies, right? We're using satellite data, satellite imagery, aerial photographs even, things like that. Do you guys have any advice for how you actually would go about contacting the sheer numbers of people that you might be talking about? Take out a press release, put something in the newspaper if there is one. How do you even let people know
00:37:42
Speaker
to satisfy your, I guess, for lack of a better way to say it, your ethical considerations for doing such a large study when so many people could be involved, potentially. Yeah, this is definitely something that came up not only in our discussions, but even when the paper was being reviewed. How do you consolidate different scales of analysis and different resolutions of data?
00:38:05
Speaker
Ultimately, I think what's important to remember is that this article and what we're advocating for is not a, ethics is not a one size fits all issue. There are definitely some contexts where doing this is really not possible, let alone practical. I think it's important nonetheless to keep these kinds of things in your mind and
00:38:27
Speaker
Ultimately, even the largest of landscape scale studies, you're going to be on the ground to some degree, most likely. I think it's important that when you are making that transition from looking at things from above to actually making specific claims or dealing with ground testing or remote sensing analysis or something like that, at that point, that's where the
00:38:50
Speaker
the power structure has to start to shift. And so I think it's not that you necessarily have to contact every single community that's on the entire land mass of Asia, if that's where your study is taking place, it's that.
00:39:06
Speaker
Let's say you are looking at ... There are these big ... The Amana Project, which covers tons of 20 different countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa. They actually have ... There were some recent papers that came out there as well, one of which is actually part of the same special issue that our article is in, talking about some of the same real problems and issues. A lot of it really also has to do with ...
00:39:30
Speaker
expanding the network of people involved in the project in general, crowdsourcing activities, getting local communities involved just in different places with your research that do manage to span continental sizes. But obviously, this is not necessarily something that can be done in every situation. And also, with our study, we were particularly concerned because of
00:39:55
Speaker
the sacred nature of a lot of the places that we were explicitly looking at. A lot of the work that we are doing is focused on one major area, which is probably about 800 to 1,000 square kilometers of space, so big, but not continentally sized.
00:40:16
Speaker
where you have more intimate knowledge of what you're looking at and the people that you're working with, I think it's important to really take these things very seriously. If you're looking at things from a much broader perspective, where the impact is not necessarily at an individual level,
Challenges with Satellite Data
00:40:33
Speaker
I think there's a little bit more leeway, but nonetheless, the same issues have to at least be considered before you start analyzing data, I would say.
00:40:43
Speaker
Analyzing or collecting? So I would say both if you are actually collecting the data. But in many instances, one of the potentially great and also terrifying things is that a lot of this data is already there. So, you know, the Landsat program has been.
00:41:00
Speaker
circling the globe for 30 or 40 years, maybe more at this point. So there's decades worth of data covering almost every inch of the globe. And that's just one one suite of satellites. So right. And that brings in a whole new dimension of this as well, because you have, you know, European and American satellites circling the globe. And now you're doing research on countries that had nothing to do with putting those up in the first place and who maybe they can access the data, but not always.
00:41:30
Speaker
Right. And some of those earlier data sets are from military applications. That brings in a whole nother concern. It's old spy photos. Yeah. So practically, if you're working on not a continental scale project, but something more like your project,
00:41:48
Speaker
How do you get in touch with people? Who do you bring in? Who do you ask? Chris alluded to that. Do you put out ads in the local paper? Hey, are you interested in this? And then in your case, what does that community engagement actually look like on the ground?
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I think this is something very from guarantee. All archaeologists who are working in a developing country, once you get to the country, you need the permission of nationality, then you go to the regional one, then you need to go to the local authority.
00:42:23
Speaker
But sometimes it depends. And I think that's what Dylan was trying to explain. There's no one size fits all in these things. And we are not advocating for that. This is how we should do it. That's not the point yet. The point here is for us, archaeologists,
00:42:44
Speaker
We do have our community because we have the activities community and we have our own circle which has its own ethics to discover past human behaviors.
00:43:01
Speaker
and we are really sticking into that principle. But we should also know that when we go to another culture, they also have their own ethics because they're also having their own cycles. Without recognizing that, if you are just sticking in your archaeological ethics,
00:43:29
Speaker
then you have a problem because you're going to clash, you're going to conflict with another edge and you don't want that. So we don't really have advice or suggestion for one size fits all, but I think the main takeaway here is like, when you go to anywhere in the world, outside of the Western world, then you need to like recognize like,
00:43:58
Speaker
I'm going to win another country. And they have their own ethics, just to recognize that. And when you are there, there is no protocols or procedures to follow. But because countries have different way of doing this kind of thing. But if you are in Madagascar, for example, you have to go to the community leader
00:44:27
Speaker
and the community leader, we would organize a meeting. And that's when you explain to everybody, this is the purpose of my research, and we are going to use this, and we are going to do that. And if people accept you in that meeting, then you are good to go. So we don't really have
00:44:51
Speaker
general advice or suggestion, but that's the main thing that we want to look at. Just recognize that there is another culture you're going to meet somewhere.
00:45:03
Speaker
And going off of that, like in terms of the work that's been done in this region in Madagascar or our team works, that is literally the practice that we had is when we went onto the, you know, into these communities and wanted to assess certain things we had seen perhaps in satellite images, we would meet with every community leader in all of the villages that we happen to be passing through. And so this might be 15, 20 different
00:45:32
Speaker
village presidents that we would go kind of door to door almost, and you'd explain the research. They'd get a sense of what you were trying to do. They could give you some hints on, hey, that's a really interesting project. You might also want to look over here. And so it gets people interested, it gets people involved, and it also makes sure that everyone is aware and consenting to what you are actually trying to do.
00:45:54
Speaker
So as we're wrapping up the show, guys, I just want to, I'm curious in your, obviously the writing of this paper and discussions with other people, reviewers, things like that. Have you heard of any experiences that people had where they did exactly this, they presented what they want to do. They said, here's what I want to research and all this stuff. And they, you know, flat out get a no from the, from the cultural group. Cause I would imagine in a number of cases that
00:46:20
Speaker
they appreciate just being consulted on this because often in the past, archaeologists and other scientific groups have not consulted with local people, right? So I imagine there's a lot of appreciation there when that does happen, but I would also imagine that there's times when they're like, no, we don't want this out there. We don't want you to do this research. Do you have any feedback on that? That's right.
00:46:42
Speaker
I think I've seen a lot of that in the field. And those are not really like the local community being reticent or reluctant, but it's because of the previous researchers that were doing bad things to them before. Like, oh, we've seen researchers who came here before you, and they come and collect their data.
00:47:09
Speaker
benefit anything from it now you come again uh either you pay us or you just go home because yeah we are we are just tired of you guys yeah you're just like from the city or you're just from everywhere i don't know where are you from but
00:47:28
Speaker
You are just coming here to bother us, you see? And I think this is the importance of these people, to explain, because it's not just for the researcher who is going to undertake, who is going to conduct this research, but it's also for the researchers who will come after him.
00:47:51
Speaker
If you are doing something preposterous to those community, then that will stick to their mind.
00:48:01
Speaker
any time we are seeing people who come here, either like archaeological study or another study, but it's from the from town or from abroad, then it's the same for them. It's just like a loss of time. It's just a waste of time. So I've seen that a lot, Chris, actually. I've seen that. Yeah, that makes sense.
00:48:23
Speaker
Yeah, actually, that sounds... What you're talking about, Netto, is very familiar from a North American context, where a lot of native groups feel that anthropologists and archaeologists are just there to extract
00:48:37
Speaker
Yes. And that need to change from an extractive model to a collaborative community building. One where it's not to just generate knowledge for somebody to use in some abstract sense, but one that applies both to the local communities and to the researchers. But there's decades, centuries, in fact, in our context here, of bad blood.
00:49:05
Speaker
of distrust for very good reasons. And so getting over that seems like that's the real challenge, isn't it? Yeah.
Involving Communities from Research Design
00:49:12
Speaker
Actually, that's why I like my lab, the OBT lab. We're a member of the lab because our lab is like not only we go to the field and meet those people, but we start from the research design. When we design a research, then we start to communicate with those people.
00:49:35
Speaker
hey, we are thinking that we are going to do research about this. What do you think? Do you think we should tackle another issue? Or do you think you should add another issue in this kind of research? Something like that. So our procedure in our research in that lab is we start from the beginning until the end. We are trying to be transparent.
00:50:04
Speaker
with the local community we are working with so it's not just like a very such design but even like they're aware of the funding event like how we get funding it's not like you just go there and people think like oh those are different as you have money can you give me some money can you buy me this can you give me a gift something like that but they know exactly how much we get from the funding and
00:50:31
Speaker
of the spending itself and why we are searching for those, why are we doing those research? Even the writing itself. If you look at the paper that Dilan and I were like, and the others were writing, there are many local people that collaborated with us in that name as a conference.
00:50:56
Speaker
So if we are trying to do such kind of thing, I think things will just change. I'm not saying that it's going to change like in a snap of any like that, but we can change things. We can change things.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:51:10
Speaker
Well, I think that papers like this, discussions like this, podcast episodes where we talk about stuff like this is where that change gets made, right? So we tell our colleagues, we promote these things out and we
00:51:24
Speaker
just have the conversation. That's what promotes the change. So I want to thank our two guests, Dylan and Nadu, for coming on. And we have a lot of great links on the show notes for this episode. So go to arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech forward slash 161 to see the show notes. Or in your podcast player, they're probably right there. And you can click on it and take you to a link and a paper. So again, Dylan and Nadu, thank you very much for coming on the show.
00:51:53
Speaker
Thanks for having us. Thank you very much for having us.
00:52:01
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:52:26
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:52:49
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.