Community Engaged Scholarship and the Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (OKPAN), founded in 2016, recently engaged in strategic planning that has helped streamline our programs and increase the breadth of our community engagement. In our paper, we highlight two initiatives that have proved particularly effective at empowering communities that have traditionally been excluded from archaeology. The first is a high school internship program conducted in partnership with a different historically disenfranchised Oklahoma community each summer. The internship is co-taught by an archaeologist and a community member with expertise in their community's heritage, and it culminates in student production of Oklahoma's annual "Archaeology Month" poster. The second program we discuss is an online heritage magazine called, for its first four years of publication, "OKPAN Quarterly," but recently renamed "The Community Archaeologist." The magazine is produced entirely by University of Oklahoma graduate and undergraduate students from departments across campus, and it features content written by members of many diverse Oklahoma communities. Both initiatives fulfill OKPAN's commitment to heritage and service by extending our collaborative networks into K–12 and digital spaces that engage more people in new, diverse, and reimagined ways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Collaborative and Community Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36067.0