Advocacy in Archaeology: Thoughts from the Urban Frontier

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Advocacy in Archaeology: Thoughts from the Urban Frontier," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Archaeologists have a history of being prime agents of change, particularly in advocating for protection and preservation of heritage resources, which have led to many historic preservation laws and ordinances and the development of CRM in the mid-20th century. During this time, urban archaeological groups and individual archaeologists were required to be diligent advocates for heritage as the fast-paced nature of urbanization threatened historical resources and a sense of place. Today as more social issues intersect with archaeology, such as climate change, neoliberal development and loss of historical memory, we see archaeologists continuing to advocate for not only historic resources but for larger social justice issues that threaten the communities these resources reside. This session will explore the theme Revolution from an activist standpoint, drawing on urban professional archaeologists, organizations and their members and the advocacy efforts in a variety of social justice and historic preservation projects they work in.