Close to Home: bringing heritage management graduate programs to descendant communities

Summary

Hawaiʻi’s state regulations require principal investigators in the 26 active archaeological consulting firms to possess "a graduate degree from an accredited institution in archaeology, or anthropology, with a specialization in archaeology, or an equivalent field." Because there have been few opportunities for appropriate local graduate training, many heritage management specialists are hired from regions outside of Hawaiʻi and begin with little background or connection to descendant communities. As of 2008 none of the PI’s in Hawaiʻi were native Hawaiian, and currently, only one of the firms has a Native Hawaiian PI/owner. This first PI was a product of a new track at UH Mānoa in "Applied Archaeology." In 2015, the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo will be admitting 9 students each year to a new Heritage Management MA program with the specific intent of reaching graduate students from Pacific Island descendant communities. The new MA will address heritage training at the most ethnically diverse 4-year public university in the nation. The local graduate programs allow candidates to develop specialties within heritage management with emphases in community-based research, and foster specific analytical areas of expertise that are within geographic, philosophical, and economic reach of their own lives.

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)   •
• Archaeologies by Community Mandate: Practicing Collaborative and Community-Engaged Research

Keywords

Spatial Coverage