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It recognizes that heritage is not a resource to be managed, but a relationship to be nurtured.
It centers care, community, and consent. It embraces not only technical knowledge, but
also emotional repair—acknowledging that memory is not always celebratory. It can be
painful, fractured, unresolved. But to care for such memory is also to care for the people
who carry it. This kind of archaeology does not glorify ruins. It treats them as sites of
encounter: between past and present, between silence and speech, between hurt and
healing. It does not ask, “What can we prove?” but rather, “What can we learn?” “Whom
have we not heard?” and “What futures might we make possible?”

This is not utopian. It is simply honest. It is archaeology that has returned to its deepest
purpose: not as a tool of certainty, but as a gesture of listening. Archaeology has to
embrace ambiguity to be truly meaningful as a critical practice.

III. Conclusion: A Practice of Care, A Vision of Hope
If archaeology is to matter in this century—in this island, on this fragile earth—it must
become a practice of care. Care for the land—not only in terms of resource management,
but as a living presence that holds memory. Care for memory—not as myth, but as a
dynamic, plural, and unfinished process. Care for communities—not as subjects of
research, but as co-creators of meaning. But care alone is not enough. We also need hope
and prospect. Hope that does not deny the violence of the past but refuses to be imprisoned
by it. Hope that finds in broken pots and forgotten tanks the seeds of resilience.