Archaeology Heritage And Civic Engagement

The definition of “public archaeology” has expanded in recent years to include archaeologists’ collaborations with and within communities and activities in support of education, civic renewal, peacebuilding, and social justice. Barbara Little and Paul Shackel, long-term leaders in the growth of a civically-engaged, relevant archaeology, outline a future trajectory for the field in this concise, thoughtful volume. Drawing from the archaeological study of race and labor, among other examples, the authors explore this crucial opportunity and responsibility, then point the way for the discipline to contribute to the contemporary public good.

Little and Shackel use case studies from different regions across the world to challenge archaeologists to create an ethical public archaeology that is concerned not just with the management of cultural resources, but with social justice and civic responsibility.

Exploring archaeology, community engagement and cultural heritage protection in South Asia, this book considers heritage management strategies through community engagement, bringing together the results of research undertaken by archaeologists, heritage practitioners and policy makers working towards the preservation and conservation of both cultural and natural heritage. The book highlights the challenges faced by communities, archaeologists and heritage managers in post-conflict and post-disaster contexts in their efforts to protect, preserve and present cultural heritage, including issues of sustainability, linkages with existing community programmes and institutions, and building administrative and social networks. The case-studies illustrate larger-scale projects to small micro-level engagement, across a range of geographical, political, social and economic contexts, providing a framework that links and synchronises programmes of archaeological activities alongside active community engagement. The chapters ‘Introduction’, ‘Community Engagement in the Greater Lumbini Area of Nepal: the Micro-Heritage Case-Study of Dohani’ and ‘Conclusion’ of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Making Heritage Together presents a case study of public archaeology by focusing on the collaborative creation of knowledge about the past with a rural community in central Crete. It is based on a long-term archaeological ethnography project that engaged this village community in collectively researching, preserving and managing their cultural heritage. This volume presents the theoretical and local contexts for the project, explains the methodology and the project outcomes, and reviews in detail some of the public archaeology actions with the community as examples of collaborative, research-based heritage management. What the authors emphasize in this book is the value of local context in designing and implementing public archaeology projects, and the necessity of establishing methods to understand, collaborate and interact with culturally specific groups and publics. They argue for the implementation of archaeological ethnographic research as a method of creating instances and spaces for collaborative knowledge production. The volume contributes to a greater understanding of how rural communities can be successfully engaged in the management of their own heritage. It will be relevant to archaeologists and other heritage professionals who aim to maximise the inclusivity and impact of small projects with minimal resources and achieve sustainable processes of collaboration with local stakeholders.

Pedagogy and Practice in Heritage Studies presents teaching strategies for helping students think critically about the meanings of the past today. In these pragmatic case studies, experienced teachers discuss ways to integrate the values of heritage studies into archaeology curricula, illustrating how the two fields enrich each other and how perspectives drawn from teaching public archaeology invite such engagement. The contributors argue for encouraging empathy, which can lead to awareness of the continuity between past and present; for reflecting on contemporary cultural norms; and for engagement with current issues of social and climate justice. These practical examples model ways to introduce diverse perspectives on history in pre-college, undergraduate, and graduate contexts while frankly assessing the challenges and pitfalls of these approaches. Emphasizing the importance of heritage studies principles and active learning in archaeological education, this handbook and its companion, History and Approaches to Heritage Studies, provide tools to equip archaeologists and heritage professionals with collaborative, community-based, and activist approaches to the past. Contributors: Susan J. Bender | Richard Effland | Ricardo J. Elia | Frances Hayashida | A. Gwynn Henderson | Elizabeth Kryder-Reid | Meredith Anderson Langlitz | Nicolas Laracuente | Shereen Lerner | Alicia Ebbitt McGill | Lewis C. "Skip" Messenger, Jr. | Phyllis Mauch Messenger | Amalia Pérez-Juez | Thomas Pluckhahn | Charles S. White Volumes in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel

This book presents an innovative approach to public archaeology in a rural community, which has had powerful results in terms of empowering a village community in Crete to become long-term guardians of their cultural heritage. Highlighting the theoretical and local contexts of the Philioremos Peak Sanctuary Public Archeology Project, this book explores the methodology and the project outcomes, and assesses best practice in the field of public archaeology within a rural community. As well as expanding the research on Minoan peak sanctuaries, the volume contributes to a greater understanding of how rural communities can be successfully engaged in the management of heritage, and is relevant to archaeologists and other heritage professionals wishing to understand the latest developments in public archaeology.

This book traces the development of 'community archaeology', identifying both its advantages and disadvantages by describing how and why tensions have arisen between archaeological and community understandings of the past. The focus of this book is the conceptual disjunction between heritage and data and the problems this poses for both archaeologists and communities in communicating and engaging with each other. In order to explain the extent of the miscommunication that can occur, the authors examine the ways in which a range of community groups, including communities of expertise, define and negotiate memory and identity. Importantly, they explore the ways in which these expressions are used, or are taken up, in struggles over cultural recognition - and ultimately, the practical, ethical, political and theoretical implications this has for archaeologists engaging in community work. Finally, they argue that there are very real advantages for archaeological research, theory and practice to be gained from engaging with communities.

This book is about the way that professionals in archaeology and in other sectors of heritage interact with a range of stakeholder groups, communities and the wider public. Whilst these issues have been researched and discussed over many years and in many geographical contexts, the debate seems to have settled into a comfortable stasis wherein it is assumed that all that can be done by way of engagement has been done and there is little left to achieve. In some cases, such engagement is built on legislation or codes of ethics and there can be little doubt that it is an important and significant aspect of heritage policy. This book is different, however, because it questions not so much the motivations of heritage professionals but the nature of the engagement itself, the extent to which this is collaborative or contested and the implications this has for the communities concerned. Furthermore, in exploring these issues in a variety of contexts around the world, it recognises that heritage provides a source of engagement within communities that is separate from professional discourse and can thus enable them to find voices of their own in the political processes that concern them and affect their development, identity and well-being. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.