Excavating the “Who” and “Why” of Participation in a Public Archaeology Project

Abstract

AbstractSwede Hollow Park, in St. Paul, Minnesota, was originally inhabited by immigrants to St. Paul. Despite an engaged surrounding neighborhood, the park and its history are not widely known. The park was recently the site of a public archaeology project, providing an opportunity to explicitly examine who participated and why, as a means of assessing the success of public education. The project team used surveys and informal interviews as assessment tools for analyzing the demographics and motivations of the participating public. Understanding demographics and motivations is an understudied aspect of public archaeology and yet is crucially important in influencing how archaeologists interact with the public, frame their research questions, and create learning objectives. This information has the potential to help create more inclusive public archaeology projects (for example, drawing in more recent immigrant communities as well as descendants) and to indicate where more work needs to be done to accommodate diversity (in our case, understanding the homeless as stakeholders). It also can help clarify whether archaeologists can, or should, prioritize site, method, or narrative when engaging with the public, or whether the public should choose.