Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster symposium brings together researchers from the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast project and the Bova Marina Archaeological Project, southern Italy, to facilitate a broader discussion and comparison of rural communities in two different settings: the western Irish coast and southwestern Calabria of Italy. Although many surface differences exist—chiefly climate and environment—deeper similarities may reveal themselves when archaeologists embed themselves in local communities and seek to work with community members to tell broad stories about life, sustenance, and continuity and change in local ways of life. How do people in these communities relate to and manage their local tangible and intangible heritage practices? How did people work together in largely self-sustaining ways to build livelihoods? How are these communities affected by processes of globalization, modernization, and out-migration? This session aims to start a dialogue between two groups of researchers in order to elucidate these and other questions related to rural coastal livelihoods over the past two centuries.