The Rubber Hit the Road, But How Do I Keep the Wheels Rolling?: Staying Engaged in Public Archaeology and Outreach While Digging Deeper into Management and Compliance

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cultural Resource Management, Compliance, Public Archaeology, Community-Based Research, Collaborative Archaeology, and many other subfields create numerous intersections and roundabouts. Some connect the entire country and others make it safer for parents to drop off their kids at school in the morning. The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) Cultural Resources team is a leader in creative mitigation and the collaborative processes centered around communities intricately connected to projects and creating much more than new sections of highway. High profile projects of recent years provide hope for the future of transportation development and all the archaeology that goes along with it. The recent publication of “A Practitioner's Guide to Public Archaeology: Intentional Programming for Effective Outreach” by Reetz and Sperling (2024) provides ideas and techniques for all sorts of programming, as well as community-based heritage management programs. One reality is that everyday tasks in compliance and management provide a variety of ways to engage with many “publics”. This paper follows the newest CDOT staff archaeologist walking the right-of-way and embracing individual moments as public archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Collaborative and Community Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50241