On Thu, 21 Aug 1997 11:40:33, Homer Thiel wrote: >The SOPA/ROPA debate has repeatedly noted that one benefit of setting up >ROPA wo >uld be to have somewhere to submit grievances to other lapses in archaeological >ethics. > >I know of two cases here in Arizona where ROPA would be useful. In one >case an a >rchaeological firm consistently misses sites or declares sites ineligible >becaus >e the area was once plowed. Needless to say, major sites would have been >destroy >ed except for the quick actions of interested archaeologists. In the >second case >, a prominent archaeologist has excavated at a number of sites over the last 10 >years and hasn't published a single report. > >I am not excited about paying additional dues and fees. However, with an >organiz >ation like ROPA, it might be possible to assemble data on firms/individuals and >force them to act responsibly or get out of archaeology entirely. > >One problem I see is that when firms/individuals are censored by ROPA for their >activities they will probably immediately resort to lawsuits against ROPA. >How w >ould legal costs be paid for? ====== If the archaeologists who you believe are violating SOPA/ROPA codes are members of SOPA(or ROPA), then you or someone else could ask the grievance coordinator to look into it and to determine if there is a credible basis for your concerns. The grievance process would then take it as far as the evidence warrants. The case could go nowhere, if your complaint turned out to be based on flimsy or mistaken evidence, or it could be taken all the way to censure or dismissal from SOPA/ROPA, if a serious problem was found to exist. This process will be effective for the field as a whole to the extent that SOPA or ROPA registration becomes a standard part of becoming a professional archaeologist. SOPA has developed institutional standards for organizations that do archaeological research, but these remain "exhortatory" and there are at present no mechanisms for filing a grievance against a firm as opposed to an individual. I don't know what ACRA is doing in this area. SOPA is developing a process for certifying academic fieldschools, which goes a step beyond the set of standards they developed some years ago. As I understand it, academic field schools which wished to receive SOPA's stamp of approval would voluntarily submit information about their program. (SOPA officers, correct me if I have not reported this accurately). Presumably ROPA would continue these initiatives. With regard to the potential for lawsuits, I'll second Hester Davis' comments about SOPA's successful history of carrying out grievance procedures without these having resulted in litigation. The key element here is that someone who has been accepted to SOPA will have voluntarily and explicitly agreed to participate in the SOPA grievance process if his or her ethics or standards receive a credible challenge. Anyone can of course sue anyone for anything, but it is much harder to litigate against a grievance process that you have voluntarily and formally agreed to participate in, when that agreement was an absolutely central element in your being accepted by an organization (in this case, SOPA or ROPA) in the first place. Since the nature of SOPA/ROPA and its relationship to other archaeological organizations does not seem to be well-known, I'd like to expand this in my usual long-winded way by offering some additional observations. Broad-based membership organizations such as SAA have codes of ethics that are valuable in an exhortatory way, but they have absolutely no way of enforcing these standards without undergoing extremely high risks of successful lawsuits against them. When you sign up to become a member of SAA, you agree to accept SAA's code of ethics. Because SAA is an open membership organization (which is as it should be), it does not require that applicants demonstrate any qualifications for membership, it has no established mechanisms for evaluating specific complaints about the ethics of specific members, and it has no established mechanisms for expelling members who violate its ethical code. Since it was established 62 years ago, SAA has welcomed as members not only professional archaeologists, but students, avocational archaeologists, and members of the general public. This has been one of its strengths and it is very unlikely to change. If SAA were to launch an ad hoc investigation of the behavior of a particular member and attempt to expell that member as a result, I can guarantee you that that they would be very likely to end up in court with a very high probability of losing a lot of money. That doesn't mean that the SAA ethics committee, which Hester Davis chairs, can't do a lot of good by promoting discussion of ethics, improving the organization's code of ethics, publicizing problems in the field, generating hypothetical case studies of ethical dilemmas, etc. But the SAA ethics committee is not set up to investigate or put pressure on individual SAA members to behave in a more ethical and professional way. Many professional fields depend on state-based licensing or certification by boards that may include respected professionals as well as state bureaucrats. In other fields, the profession itself comes up with mechanisms for accrediting people who have met certain standards of training and experience, as well as mechanisms of various sorts for dealing with failure to perform in a professional manner. SOPA/ROPA is in this second category. In cases where the profession itself takes on this responsibility, the accreditation/grievance process is usually carried out by some kind of entity that is legally and structurally insulated from the broad-based professional society that runs or sponsors it. By broad-basedprofessional society, I mean one like SAA or SHA that puts out publications, has meetings where papers are read, promotes the interests of its members through a government affairs program, engages in an active program of public education, etc., etc. ROPA, if established, would not be a broad-based organization, but a special-purpose entity that would focus on promulgating and enforcing standards of ethics and research performance. To the extent that it engaged in broader issues, it would be to disseminate information about issues of professionalism and to promote legislative or bureaucratic actions that supported professional standards. This is what SOPA does now, and if ROPA is established, it would continue this work, but hopefully with a larger percentage of the archaeological profession participating, and with the explicit backing of the major broad-based archaeological organizations. That's the deal.