Getting Out of the Hole and Off the Ground: Starting a Collaborative Community Heritage Project from Scratch as Outsiders

Summary

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

The North Brentwood Community Heritage Project developed out of a conversation in December of 2019 between one of the authors and a town councilmember. Work on the project finally began with digital documentation work in October of 2021, after a long Covid delay. The first excavation began in the Summer of 2022. Additional digital documentation of historic properties, collaborative interpretation classes, and community meetings fill out the accomplishments completed so far. After this 5-year history, we finally feel like we can say the collaborative heritage project has started. This paper will provide a brief history of the project and its components. Then, we explain why it is only in the summer of 2024 that we feel a true collaborative project can now be claimed. We discuss the strategies we have employed to balance supporting the community’s heritage efforts, respecting the privacy of its members, and conducting academic research.

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): 53665