The Public Benefit of Archaeology: An Economic Perspective from the Wide Ruins Community.

Summary

A re-occurring theme in current Cultural Resource Management activities involve the term "Public Benefit". A majority of the discussions using that term refer to archaeological contributions to our understanding of a shared cultural patrimony. A lesser known aspect of Public Benefit is the direct monetary gain a community sees as a result of CRM work. On a general level, archaeological projects contribute via payroll and sales taxes. On a local level, area businesses benefit from spending by the field crew and contractor. Additionally, when local labor is used, particularly in an area of high unemployment , the added influx of wages can alter) the economic status of the community members. Finally, using local labor provides on-the-job training for area residents. In the summer of 2014 Northland Research, Inc. undertook a large data recovery project in the Wide Ruins community located on the Navajo Nation. Eighty percent of the crew was Native American, many from the Wide Ruins Chapter. This paper presents an analysis of the economic impact of that project to the Wide Ruins Community as well as the benefits Northland realized having a primarily Native Crew.

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)   •
• CRM, Kinteel, and the Community of Wide Ruins

Keywords

Spatial Coverage