The 19th Annual Ethics Bowl
The SAA Committee on Ethics invites graduate and undergraduate students to organize a team of 3 to 5 participants with a faculty mentor to take part in the next year's event during the 89th Annual Meeting of the SAA, April 17-21, 2024, in New Orleans, LA.
If your university* is interested in participating in the event, please contact us at saaethicsbowl@gmail.com by January 31, 2024. To register for this event, send an email to the organizing committee with the names and email addresses of the 3-5 members of your team and your faculty mentor. Please designate a chief contact person (team member or faculty mentor) to receive emails and instructions on behalf of the team.
*Note: Teams made up of more than one institution are allowed. All team members must be registered for the 89th Annual Meeting in order to participate.
About the Ethics Bowl
The Ethics Bowl is a debate competition for undergraduate and graduate students where teams from different universities compete by debating solutions to the ethical dilemmas archaeologists face in our day-to-day lives. Each year, hypothetical cases are developed using real-life experiences and suggestions from academic, CRM, and avocational archaeologists around the world. Ethics Bowl teams then formulate and defend reactions and solutions to these ethical dilemmas using their academic knowledge of numerous ethical guidelines and laws, as well as their personal research and fieldwork experiences. Judges drawn from professional and eminent archaeologists grade the teams on their responses, throw them curveball questions that extend or change key components of the cases, and decide which teams advance to the final round and compete for prizes. It’s an awesome experience and a great opportunity to practice ethical decision making before being placed in a hard situation in real life. Judges regularly comment that Ethics Bowl contestants demonstrate stronger ethical decision making skills than many working archaeologists have sometimes shown.
All rounds are held in front of live audiences during the SAA Annual Meeting.
Congratulations to past winners
2023 - University of Idaho
2022 - University of Tennessee, Knoxville
2021 - University of Alabama and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2019 - University of Kentucky
2018 - Cornell University
2017 - University of Puerto Rico and University of California, San Diego
2016 - University of Georgia
2014 - University of California, Berkeley
2013 - University of California, Berkeley
2012 - Northern Arizona University
2011 - University of California, Santa Barbara
2010 - Brown University
2009 - Texas A&M University
2008 – University of California, Berkeley
2007 - Brown University
2006 - San Diego State University
2005 - University of Arizona
2004 - Indiana University/University of Nevada-Reno
Preparing for the Ethics Bowl
Article by Janet Levy
In recent years, archaeologists have begun to confront a range of
ethical issues—the conundrum of looting, the interactions we have with
descendent communities, the complications of business oriented CRM
archaeology. How the next generation of scholars chose to address these
and other ethical dilemmas will define the field of archaeology—what it
offers and what it does—in the new millennium.
In 2004, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) inaugurated the
Ethics Bowl at its annual meeting in Montreal, Canada to help students
gain a sense of ethical responsibility and give them the tools to tackle
professional ethics in an enjoyable setting. During the Ethics Bowl,
teams of graduate and/or undergraduate students debate case studies
which illuminate a variety of ethical issues in modern archaeology.
Student teams consist of three to five individuals, guided by at least
one faculty mentor.
After two years of running the Ethics Bowl, many of the students have
asked the question: how should our team prepare? So, to help students
and professors get ready, I offer some hints and suggestions.
Principals of Archaeological Ethics