Breaking the untold rule: community archaeology a bond of people and information

Summary

The relationship between the academia and non-academic individuals is often challenging, as there are tensions between who owns the power to produce knowledge. Citizen science is breaking this untold rule by incorporating the communities, fostering interactions that help transform segregated relationships. Recovery of knowledge from traditional and local perspectives has shown that individuals and communities hold very valuable, deep knowledge regarding their specific surroundings and daily life. In community archaeology the line that separates the archaeologist and the community is blurred, permitting the development of bonds between people that stimulates sharing of information. When information is shared knowledge grows and can inspire teaching others, permitting the formation of strong bonds between the groups sharing it. With the creation of information flows from multiple perspectives, it is possible to reach a better understanding of the topic at hand. These interactions not only benefit the research at the academic stage, but can also enrich the personal development of all the parties involved. In this presentation I shall be discussing these ideas of interaction between academic and community environments, from a personal perspective, including possible doubts and benefits, and how both communities and researchers can both develop relationships starting from equality.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Many faces, many perspectives: archaeology and communities in practice.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage