‘Always Viking’: Archaeologists Collaborating with Public Service Media to Broaden Access to Archaeological Fieldwork

Abstract

This article examines how collaboration with Public Service Media structures the relationship between archaeologists and the public. To be able to understand such collaborations, we have studied an online news production by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Always Viking’, covering one week of excavating the recently discovered Viking ship at Gjellestad in Norway. The findings suggest that the journalists, even when doing an online-first production, mostly worked according to a broadcasting media logic, with few opportunities for the public to participate. In this, they prioritized the audience’s ‘perceived reality’ over the archaeologists’ ‘referential reality’ (Holtorf, 2007: 151–52) to secure a broader reach. Some elements of the format supported more reciprocal audience participation, however, by combining a livestream with open and ongoing Q&A sessions. This opened for more unmediated, direct, and meaningful encounters between the archaeologists and the public. Overall, the study shows that the long and mutually beneficial collaboration between public service broadcasting and archaeology (Piccini, 2007) can be strengthened by undertaking joint experimentation and exploration of participatory communication models online.