© 2014 Taylor & Francis archaeological process. However, if these models are to become our post-colonial practice, then archaeologists must accept a high degree of ethical responsibility regarding the production of the past in the present with future consequences. A truly engaged archaeology thus becomes a present-centred and future-oriented practice. Yet despite the increasingly widespread recognition of the need for archaeologists to be more socially engaged, truly collaborative and participatory archaeologies, in which African stakeholders participate in research design, execution and interpretation, often struggle to emerge. Indeed, although local community engagement in the archaeological process is becoming more commonplace, simply teaching local people to excavate, paying them to work on a project and informing them of the findings of the project does not transform archaeological practice (Shepherd 2003). Thus, despite being acutely aware of the ethical sensitivities of archaeology in Africa, we argue that the African archaeological community, with rare exceptions (Schmidt 2009), tends to shy away from concerted official ethical debate and the practical corollaries thereof. Instead, it seems as a community that we prefer to leave such issues in the classroom where established practitioners relay a set of well-defined heritage ethics, typically regarding the proper management of the past, to future archaeologists so that it will be learnt and hopefully reproduced in the field. Indeed, although it is common to hear informal ethical debate, there appears to be a tendency to steer clear of more formal debate in our conference papers and peer-reviewed publications (see Giblin, this issue), a challenge that we as editors have encountered in the production of this issue. However, the confinement of official ethics to didactic replication prevents the construction of different, potentially more ethically appropriate, responses and it denies the dynamism and contextuality of ethics themselves.

Thus, this issue of Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, unusually with regard to African archaeology, considers the ethical practice of archaeologists beyond matters of heritage management and public engagement as it focuses attention on the positive and negative roles of archaeology in contemporary African societies and points towards a more dynamic, reflexive and thus responsible post-colonial mode of practice. In short, we believe that ethics in African archaeology should not be something that is learnt as a list of rules in the classroom, which are then followed in ‘tick-box’fashion ad infinitum. Instead, following Meskell and Pels (2005), we argue that they must be embedded, contextualised and continually returned to and reconstructed as practice persists. In this way, the ethics of yesteryear may be subtly or radically different to those of today while in similar fashion today’s ethics should be altered and refined in the future to reflect the concerns of various different locations and times. Thus, this volume seeks to restart a conversation in African archaeology by recentring ethics as a continual concern to be debated and acted upon. Consequently, all contributors were asked to identify contemporary ethical issues and to propose mechanisms by which these might be addressed. These issues focus on multiple realms of archaeological practice, from research design and contract formation to the process of fieldwork and data recovery and on to data interpretation and presentation. In so doing, we and they draw attention to the continuum of archaeological practice, emphasising that as the process of ‘doing’archaeology does not cleave neatly into praxis and theory or …