Bridging the Professional-Public Divide through Flood Recovery Compliance Archaeology at the University of Iowa

Summary

Recent federally-funded flood relief compliance projects on the University of Iowa campus provided the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist with an opportunity to involve various publics in our work. It also provided us with an opportunity to reflect critically on how we represent our work and archaeology more broadly to the public and how our work is presented to even wider publics by the media. We first present an overview of the various approaches we took to engage the public in learning about on-going compliance archaeology resulting from a major flood that impacted the university and city through active learning, lectures, discussion forums, and media interaction. We then offer some critical reflections on the successes, failures, challenges, and responsibilities of representing archaeology and the past to various publics in what are often politically-contentious settings.

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)   •
• Creative Public-Centered Approaches to Compliance Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage