Profile: Carlos Eduardo Thompson

About Carlos Eduardo Thompson : I am Archaeologist and Art Fashion Director , the name of the Project is Fashion Heritage Project. An explicitly positivist Brazilian Archaeology could be democratizing, its frame of open neutrality meant distancing oneself from the political realm. It seemed that one had to accept oneself split in two, half scientist and half social being. But this did not mean that archaeology had no social role in Rio de Janeiro. If archaeology was to be cared for by the nation state, it was increasingly important that it be accountable. The public presentation of the past in museums also increasingly became professionalized. So right from its inception, archaeology as a science had been tied to the notion that archaeology had a public role. In this sense the New Archaeologists were just stating what archaeologists had always claimed, even if they chose a more extreme, positivist perspective, and even if they saw themselves radicalized by the social movements in the 1970s in Rio de Janeiro. In the late 1990s I absorbed the idea that archaeologists had a professional and paternalistic duty to follow repeatable and accountable procedures (dig well) for the larger public good. But the increasingly esoteric aspects of archaeological science seemed to take one farther away from that goal.