Defining Site Stewardship: Origins and Our Family Tree

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The main work areas of cultural site stewardship are easy to identify: access to authentic sites for assessment, repeat visits to heritage sites, a database to track changes in those sites over time, and volunteer training partnered with professional archaeologists. However, the “why” for doing this is more than the sum of its identified parts. Defining site stewardship is as difficult as defining heritage. Where the Authorized Heritage Discourse definition of heritage includes a lengthy list of nouns: people, places, and things; in contrast, the Unauthorized Heritage Discourse definition of heritage leans into actions and verbs: heritage as a cultural process, experience, identity (Laurajane Smith 2006). Site stewardship is much the same and may be best understood as a cultural process. Site stewardship thus didn’t begin with any state or management unit, but repeat visits to sites for centuries by Indigenous and First Nations people, to pass on knowledge and track changes to traditional areas over time. Building on Rubinson’s 2014 survey of seven statewide site stewardship programs, this presentation will share preliminary findings from the National Site Stewardship 2022 survey, categorize new programs, and look at divergent origin stories, such as programs created to address impacts of climate change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35875.0