Community engagement (Other Keyword)
1-25 (31 Records)
Banjul was founded in 1816 as part of the British efforts to block the slave trade on the Gambia River. A planned urban center, the city developed around a series of neighborhoods designated as colonial, merchant, and African laborer spaces. Amongst the most prominent settlers were the Aku from Sierra Leone and French traders from Goree who were instrumental in the growth of the colonial economy. In preparation for the 200th anniversary of the city in 2016, the Banjul Heritage Project seeks...
Archaeology as Meditative Practice (2017)
In this paper I will illustrate how my research praxis necessarily altered as a product of close collaboration and consultation. The Muwekma Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area (California, USA), is a community that has been eager to engage with respectful researchers in the analysis of their ancestors remains, once they have been disturbed. As a non-indigenous researcher collaborating with the tribal community, aspects of proper respect and care towards ancestors, and materials associated with...
The Church on the Hill: Inter-related Narratives and Conflicting Priorities for the Emory Church Property in Washington, D.C. (2017)
Fort Stevens was one of the only fortifications comprising the Civil War Defenses of Washington that saw combat, during Jubal Early’s raid on July 11-12, 1864. Prior to the Civil War, the land was sold by free African American woman Elizabeth Butler to the trustees of Emory Chapel in 1855 for construction of a church; when Fort Massachusetts was initially constructed in 1861, the church stood within it, but later was razed by the Union army when the fort was expanded and renamed Fort Stevens in...
The Church on the Hill: Inter-related Narratives, Conflicting Priorities, and the Power of Community Engagement (2016)
Fort Stevens is a well-known fort within the Civil War Defenses of Washington. Prior to the Civil War, the land was owned by Betsey Butler, a free black woman, who sold the land to the trustees of Emory Chapel in 1855 for the construction of a church. The church was razed for the construction of Fort Massachusetts in 1861, which was later expanded and renamed Fort Stevens in 1863. The congregation rebuilt the church following the Civil War. The context of the Emory Church is entwined with the...
Co-Creating Digital Heritage Resources in Ghana: How Is It Going? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funded by a Canadian SSHRC-funded partnership development grant, our working group of collaborators is engaged in training and capacity building in digital heritage methods in Ghana. Project aims include fostering a community of practice inclusive of archaeologists, heritage practitioners, students...
Cottage Clusters and Community Engagement: Collaborative Investigations of Multiscalar Social Relations in 19th Century Clachans, Co. Mayo, Ireland (2016)
Human experiences are inscribed in the landscape. Indeed, the built environment has been so strongly modified by human agency that the resulting landscape is a synthesis of natural and cultural elements. Cottage clusters, known as clachans, were critical components of the landscape in the west of Ireland prior to the Great Famine. Yet this site type has been almost completely ignored in historical, archaeological, and architectural studies of the region. As a Fulbright US Scholar, I am engaged...
DIG! Goes to College: Experiential Learning in the College Classroom (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Public and Our Communities: How to Present Engaging Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Archibald Blair Site at Colonial Williamsburg, used for DIG!: Kids, Dirt, and Discovery since 2015, offered as many research questions as it did opportunities for participants to engage in experiential learning. Through a stroke of luck, the National Institute of American History and Democracy (NIAHD) at the...
Digging Out after Decades of Fast Capitalism: Addressing Richmond’s Incomplete Archaeological Legacy Through Community-Based Projects and Advocacy (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Slow Archaeology + Fast Capitalism: Hard Lessons and Future Strategies from Urban Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As the epicenter of the Lost Cause mythology, Richmond is full of edifices to certain historical ideologies. At the same time, its archaeological record is replete with archaeological failures of enormous proportion. Using political history, development data, and the archaeological...
Ethnography, Routine Archaeologies, and Social Justice Research (2018)
As the organizers of this session argue, understanding the ethics of engagement in archaeology is maturing rapidly and we are reaching the point where our community engagements are no longer self-evident. Rather we increasing understand that they need interrogation and critique, and this needs to be an embedded part of our routines. This paper will argue that knowing the nature of our engagements requires a deep ethnographic reading of the contexts of our research and the multiple roles it plays...
Facing the Past: Forensic Facial Reconstruction at Catoctin Furnace and its Role in Public Outreach (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Retrospective: 50 Years Of Research And Changing Narratives At Catoctin Furnace, Maryland", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Forensic facial reconstructions are an effective tool for communicating historical narratives and information gleaned from human skeletal remains. The method relies on the relationship between the underlying architecture of the skull and the tissues of the face. Facial reconstructions...
How I Spent My Summer Vacation: A Model for Archaeology Camps in Service of Public Outreach (2017)
Public outreach and education has increasingly become an essential component of archaeology. Helping the community become invested in the past can do wonders for perpetuating the archaeological ideals of cultural preservation and conservation. Instilling these values in the younger generation is one of the most effective ways to create a more culturally conscious future. The University of Texas at San Antonio’s Center for Archaeological Research aims to meet this goal through their educational...
In the Most Unlikely of Places: Marley R. Brown III, the College of William & Mary, and Foundational Moments in African Diaspora Archaeology (2015)
Through the nineties, there were significant moments in the development of African Diaspora archaeology as a field and as a practice. We were moving our focus from the Main House to the daily lives of captive people and interpreting plantation landscapes differently. We witnessed major archaeological discoveries, such as the African Burial Ground in New York City and the Levi Jordan Plantation in Texas, and it was the beginning of lively debates about the practice of community engagement. These...
Interpreting Race in Public: Collaborations Between Historical Archaeologists and Public Historians (2015)
Public historians and historical archaeologists often share goals of communicating knowledge about the past with the non-specialist public. However, public historians and historical archaeologists rarely collaborate or communicate with one another about their approaches to stakeholders and the past. To indicate how such collaborations enhance public interpretations of history, I will first briefly describe my experiences, as a public historian, of working with historical archaeologists on...
Leading Each Other to Water: Queer Archaeology and Consciousness Raising in New York’s Adirondacks (2017)
In 1903, white middle-class women founded Wiawaka Holiday House in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains for "working girls" to have an affordable vacation away from unhealthy factories and cities. In 2013 and 2014, I and dozens of community volunteers (ages 18 to 70) excavated on the grounds of the still-operating Wiawaka Holiday House (now the Wiawaka Center for Women). Underpinning all of the conversations and instruction about interpretation and excavation at the site were the queer...
Materializing the Momentary: Community Engagement Through Ethnographic Practice (2015)
Community engagement is a growing aspect of archaeological practice; not only are archaeologists realizing that these kinds of projects are increasingly important to the movement of decolonization in regards to the histories of under-represented communities, but also that these relationships produce valuable knowledge about sites and their life histories. This paper specifically examines the unique ethnographic moment that arises when descendants and archaeologists come together in the practice...
"Mo té la": Community-Engaged Plantation Archaeology in French Guiana (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeology in French Guiana takes place within a neo-colonial framework in terms of permitting, reporting, and disseminating results. While still a generally public pursuit, archaeological projects rarely deploy explicit strategies for involving stakeholders in research. Furthermore, because archaeology is...
Overtaking the Past: Addressing Modern Site Destruction in the Moche Valley (2016)
Through increased study of the rural hinterlands surrounding the Chimu capital at Chan Chan, a broader understanding of state structured domestic and administrative sites--so as to control labor, land, and water--has emerged. Located in the Moche Valley of Peru, the Chimú sites of Cerro la Virgen and Milagro de San Jose have the potential to provide valuable data related to urban-rural relationships, but run the risk of being destroyed by modern human activity. Using previous research and more...
‘Own It!’ Reflections On The Value Of Indigenous Archaeological Ethnography As Community Engagement (2018)
Current debate in public archaeology has repositioned archaeologists as members of the community, rather than specialists distinct from the public. Although this moves away from privileging archaeological perspectives of the past towards a more dialogical engagement with communities, in practice the motivations and agendas of specialists and public with respect to the archaeological resource are not easily reconciled. An archaeological ethnography example from Crete explores the tensions between...
Podcasting and Two-Eyed Seeing: Digital Practice, Community Engagement, and Reconciliation in Archaeological Discourse (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community or public archaeology has been the focus of professional effort and academic examination for decades. Most of this has a goal of creating public value, and takes the form of ‘outreach’ from a presumed disciplinary core, potentially downplaying conflict within the discipline. It is also a...
Pragmatism at the Intersection of Indigeneity, Cultural Property, and Intangible Heritage (2016)
When descendant groups are denied direct and meaningful engagement in decision making, heritage management policies are ineffective at best and harmful at worst. Access to and control over one’s own heritage is a basic human right essential to identity, wellbeing and worldview. The historic separation of Indigenous peoples from their heritage not only results in considerable economic and cultural harms, but is a form of violence. Community-based heritage initiatives are capable of challenging...
The Role of Intangible Heritage Values in the Management of Places and Things (2015)
One of the stated goals of decolonizing archaeological theory and practice it to redistribute power and authority in the creation and communication of cultural heritage, a laudable goal. However, achieving such a goal is only possible if archaeologists and historican relinquish their role as historiographical experts—as the ultimate authority on historical truths and significance. While in recent years there has been a trend towards increasing public outreach and engagement, in some cases such...
RVA Archaeology and the Changing Discourse of Archaeology in Richmond (2016)
Central to community conversations about the economic development of Shockoe Bottom was the general concession that any indication of significant archaeological findings would result in efforts to accommodate this possibility before development. Recognizing that conversations about archaeology did not feature the significant "voice" of archaeologists, the community convened a day-long symposium on the history and archaeology of Shockoe Bottom. This gathering led to the formation of RVA...
Scrapyards, Curious Constructions, and Local Engagement: A Southeast Arabian Perspective on Building a Flotation Machine (2017)
Since the late 1960s, flotation has been used to extract macrobotanical remains from soil. Machine-assisted flotation is a popular method; however, very few publications discuss the logistics of designing and constructing such a machine (notable exceptions include (Hunter and Gassner 1998; Nesbitt 1995; Pearsall 2015; Shelton and White 2010)). Flotation machines are often built in the country of research. The availability of local resources impacts the design, construction, and operation of a...
Shipwreck Tagging Archaeological Management Program (STAMP): A Model for Coastal Heritage Resource Management Based on Community Engagement and Citizen Science (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Citizen Science in Maritime Archaeology: The Power of Public Engagement for Heritage Monitoring and Protection" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Florida Public Archaeological Network began the Shipwreck Tagging Archaeological Management Program (STAMP) in 2019. STAMP utilizes citizen scientists to assist archaeologists in tracking the movement and degradation of beached/coastal shipwreck sites and...
The SS James Eagan Layne; The Liberty 70 Project, a Catalyst for Conversation in Submerged Cultural Heritage (2015)
The wreck of the SS James Eagan Layne (JEL) has been a diving site since 1954, due to her masts still visible above the water. She is known to be the most dived wreck in the UK and was subject to early salvaging from divers who thought it fair game. Which is a frame of thinking in British diving culture then and today. Plymouth, the location of the JEL is the birthplace of South West diving at Fort Bovisand, and as such the SHIPS Project, a non-governmental organization started the Liberty 70...