Reaching the Public vs. Connecting with the Public: Tailoring Public Archaeology’s Scope to Best Communicate with Communities

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Engaged Historical Archaeology in the Northwest", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Public archaeology emphasizes methods and interpretations which benefit those outside the academic sphere. However, "the public" is a broad and amorphous term, making it difficult for archaeologists to identify where to do a project, what form the project should take, and why they should participate in public archaeology. Within the general public, there are innumerable subsets with different focuses and interests, and when a project attempts to reach all of these publics at once, it seldom really connects with anyone. Using the creation of a mobile artifact display for the descendent community of Iosepa, Utah, as a case study, I will demonstrate the successfulness of narrowing the scope of public archaeology to specific publics. By customizing outreach to Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Latter-day Saint audiences, this project saw increased overall public interest in the archaeological process and resulted in an interpretive display that best meets community needs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Community Engaged Historical Archaeology in the Northwest

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow