To What End? Assessing the Impact of Public Archaeology in a Campaign Against Gentrification

Tracy H. Jenkins

To What End? Assessing the Impact of Public Archaeology in a Campaign Against Gentrification

Year: 2020

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

As archaeologists, we believe and hope that our work with and on behalf of communities with ties to the sites we study makes a positive difference in those communities' lives. Sometimes those impacts can be difficult to discern in a tangible way. In 2012, residents of The Hill neighborhood in Easton, Maryland, and members of the free black community rooted there from the 18th century to the present invited Archaeologists from the University of Maryland to use archaeology to help them preserve their heritage in the face of neighborhood change. A series of interviews with community leaders assesses the degree of success in this endeavor and what role archaeology played in the process.