It Brings Me No Joy to Tell You All This, but We Actually Found Gold Once: A Discussion of Visitor Engagement Using Historical and Archaeological Interpretation in Alaska Public Lands

Summary

This is an abstract from the ""Is There Gold in that Field?" CRM and Public Outreach on the Front Lines" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While they usually do not work in the capacity of Public Information Officers or interpretive staff, cultural resource managers and archaeological technicians are often the ones who are literally "fielding" questions from the public. These questions invariably deal with what "grand discoveries" we have made with finding human skeletal material or golden treasure. Rather than a discrete data assessment, this presentation will introduce anecdotal accounts of the types of questions fielded during visitor contacts at Alaska public lands including Klondike Gold Rush National Park, Denali National Park and Preserve, and the Tongas National Forest districts of Prince of Wales Island. In order to give a better sense of the context of visitation accounts, I will relate these questions within a spectrum of remoteness and accessibility of the public lands where visitation occurred, the type of visitation, and the type of visitor status (e.g., backcountry camper, cruise ship passenger, local tourism worker, hunting guide). My expectation is that this will encourage discussion on interpretation education across a wide spectrum of visitor encounters and improving methods for driving the point home of what the discipline of archaeology actually is and what our jobs actually entail.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• "Is There Gold in that Field?" CRM and Public Outreach on the Front Lines

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33096