Growing up in Canada with hobbyist archaeologists as parents, Alison Wylie spent a lot of her childhood digging through dirt.

While her friends were at summer camp learning how to canoe, she was stuck holding rods while the adults surveyed excavation sites "to within an inch of their life".

"Once they got the site surveyed … they gave us a little pit to excavate on what they thought would be the outer edges of the site," she says. "They expected it to be sterile — we couldn't do too much damage."

Inevitably, an interesting artefact would eventually turn up in the kids' pits, and the children would be shooed away.

Professor Wylie, who is presenting this year's Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture in Wollongong on Tuesday, says she didn't "get the point" of it at the time. But those early experiences set the tone of her career.

Today, she is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia (UBC), specialising in historical sciences.

Professor Alison Wylie has made a career of taking philosophy into the field. ( Supplied: Alison Wylie )

The two disciplines — philosophy and archaeology — might seem poles apart, but Professor Wylie says the act of unearthing cultural and historical artefacts raises many ethical issues.

"What I encountered in the field camp [was that] archaeologists themselves were raising philosophical questions," she says.

"They were having what might be called a 'crisis debate' about what kind of discipline they are.

"Is archaeology a science? If archaeology is a science what does that mean in terms of its goals and its practice?"

But it was the colonialist perspective of archaeology that struck Professor Wylie as one of the most pertinent ethical issues.

This challenge remains a focus of her work on the UBC's Indigenous/Science Project, which aims to "take philosophy into the field … [for] collaborative engagement with Indigenous communities" — in other words, decolonising archaeology.

Changing attitudes to First Nations history

By the time she was an undergraduate philosophy student, Professor Wylie was used to spending her summers in the field.

She applied for a Parks Canada summer job on an archaeology site, and in 1973 she was sent to Fort Walsh in Saskatchewan, halfway across Canada from her college in New Brunswick.

The site — a Northwest Mounted Police fort — was established in the 1870s to bring law and order to the Canadian West after an infamous massacre of a First Nations group by whiskey traders.

The aim of the assignment, local newspapers reported, was to "uncover the precise configuration of the original Fort buildings … and recover as many artefacts as possible".

The Northwest Mounted Police fort in Saskatchewan, Canada was established in 1875. ( Getty: David Bukach )

But Professor Wylie says she was lucky to have been working with a field director who "didn't think you should dig for digging's sake — you should always approach excavation with a sense of purpose other than just recovering materials".

"He assigned all of the field assistants who were coming on to this project a long reading list ... that included a substantial component of philosophy of science," she says.

Not everything they uncovered supported the popular view of Fort Walsh as "a brave outpost of civilisation". In fact, Professor Wylie says, there was evidence the mounted police were dependent for their survival on the First Nations they were meant to be subduing.

Although the archaeologists' findings challenged the accepted history of the site, she reflects that their approach was typical of the time in its neglect of Indigenous history and heritage.

"It was standard practice that, if you found human remains associated with clear evidence of Native American identity, they could be disinterred and send to headquarters as a 'find' or 'specimen'."

Professor Wylie says this was in stark contrast to the treatment of other remains found on the site — which brought into focus for her "the fact that the heritage we were investigating was that of the Canadian settler state".

"The conventions of archaeological practice were themselves complicit in perpetuating and sustaining … the legacy of displacement, appropriation and denial originally enacted at Fort Walsh a hundred years earlier," she observes.

UBC has installed a reconciliation pole according to Haida protocol on the land of the Musqueam people. ( Supplied: UBC/Paul Joseph )

Reconciliation through archaeology

From the 1970s onwards, Professor Wylie developed her theoretical approach by broadening the scope to include more than one perspective in archaeological practice.

So instead of adhering to one idea of the past — which, she says, usually ends up favouring the colonial lens — Indigenous histories are given equal weight.

As Professor Wylie points out, the ramifications of this research method could be wide-reaching.

"Archaeological data and interpretations of various kinds have figured large in Treaty negotiations, over recent decades, sometimes very much to the detriment of Indigenous communities," she says.

UBC's Indigenous/Science project brings archaeologists, geochemists, philosophers and social scientists together to research First Nations history, and Professor Wylie hopes their findings will benefit Indigenous communities across the globe.

"I don't know that presenting more systematically worked, better documented bodies of archaeologically grounded understandings of Indigenous histories will capture the popular imagination," she says.

"But given the damage done by certain kinds of archaeological claims in the past, it could be certainly be relevant in struggles for sovereignty."

Professor Alison Wylie is presenting this year's Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture. It will be held at 6:00pm, Tuesday July 9, in Wollongong. Register here to attend.