Why We Need to Succeed: Assessing the Outcomes of Community Archaeology Practices in County Galway, Ireland

Summary

Public involvement and collaboration with communities are major concerns for archaeologists around the world. Community outreach efforts are major components of research projects and require an immense amount of resources. Further, different stakeholders have varied responses to those efforts. This paper uses data from the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC) project’s community outreach on Inishark and Inishbofin, County Galway, Ireland, islands five miles into the Atlantic Ocean. This paper explores the community outreach methods the CLIC project uses and demonstrates through examples with diverse stakeholders, while stressing the importance of regional variation with practices and anticipated outcomes. The paper explores strategies the CLIC project employs to determine when community engaged practices are successful and ways to measure effectiveness and value. This paper discusses the benefits to understanding public archaeology outcomes and how to express the positive outcomes to various groups including those that fund archaeological research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Assessing Outcomes in Public Archaeology: Imperatives, Perils, and Frameworks

Keywords

Spatial Coverage