Human and Civil Rights, Archaeology, and Spiritual Practice Raimund Karl Prifysgol Bangor University Abstract: Archaeology and spiritual practice occasionally come into conflict with each other; particularly when spiritual practitioners want to use archaeological sites or objects for their religious practice. In such conflicts, archaeologists often argue that such practices are fine, as long as they do not affect the archaeology; but constitute irresponsible damage or wanton destruction of they do affect it. In this paper, it is demonstrated that such a position can no longer be maintained: spiritual practitioners have fundamental human and civil rights which entitle them not only to practice their religion in ways they deem necessary, but also to benefit from and enhance the cultural heritage in accordance with their values and beliefs. If archaeological and spiritual practice come into conflict, processes of conciliation between these opposed interests are necessary, processes which as yet, by and large, are missing. Keywords: Human Rights, Civil Rights, Religion, Spiritual Practice, Archaeology, Heritage --- Archaeologists are traditionally used to seeing themselves, and be seen by large segments of the general public, as stewards of ‘the past’. We have established ourselves in that role by means of what Laurajane Smith (2006: 29-34) has called the ‘authorized heritage discourse’. This discourse constitutes a disciplinary consensus within archaeology which has remained virtually unchanged for c. the last 200 years (Pollak 2011: 227). It assigns bounded ‘heritage objects’, whether they be portable antiquities, sites, buildings or indeed whole ‘heritage’ landscapes (Smith 2006: 31), an ‘intrinsic’ or ‘innate’ value (Smith 2006: 29), which is best cared for and curated by experts, ‘as it is only they who have the abilities, knowledge and understanding to identify the innate value and knowledge contained at and within historically important sites and places’ (Smith 2006: 29-30). Heritage professionals (archaeologists, architects, art historians etc.) thus are put – or rather put themselves – in the position of being the only legitimate spokespersons for ‘the past’, which they aim to preserve ‘for future generations’, thus conveniently excluding the present from any chance to alter or change both the meaning and value of heritage sites and places (Smith 2006: 29), and, perhaps even more importantly, the heritage sites and places themselves. ‘Heritage objects’ are frozen in time, and ‘the public’ relegated into the role of a ‘passive consumer’ of the ‘heritage message’ (Smith 2006: 32; Karl 2012, 24), a message that we believe to be exclusively entitled to produce. Yet, the convenient position of being the only ones who can legitimately speak for ‘the past’ we have inhabited for the better part of 200 years has, in the last few decades, become increasingly contested. Most obviously, this has been the case where ‘amateur’, ‘fringe’ or ‘alternative’ archaeologists have been concerned. To some extent, these – at least those we have considered ‘looters’ – have always been our competitors; though many have been linked closely with our discipline since its beginnings: after all, professional archaeology emerged out of a more ‘amateurish’ appreciation of ‘the past’ and its material remains in the 19 th century; and for a long time, the distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ archaeologists was quite fuzzy. In fact, for much of the late 19 th and early 20 th century,