The Best and Worst of Times: Bridging Stakeholders, Archaeologists, and Students to Craft Community Archaeology at the Robert H. Jackson Farmstead, Spring Creek, PA.

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.

We discuss the complexities of community archaeology involving stakeholders, archaeologists, and students at the 2019 Mercyhurst University field school site on the Robert H. Jackson Farmstead. Disparate but congenial sets of “publics” included persons inspired and interested in Robert H. Jackson, the famous individual; descendants interested in the man; and community members with oral and living memories. Navigation of potential conflicts over project visibility, site access, responsible curation, and interpretive focus was facilitated by transparency and cooperation, archaeological planning and practice, and opportunities for public engagement. The employment of (decolonizing) tenets of modern historical archaeology was ensured by presenting community archaeology to students as a conventional part of historical archaeology. We argue that for archaeology to remain relevant in a changing academic and political climate, projects like these should be central to the training of future generations of archaeologists.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 1026