The Public Benefits of Historical Archaeology: The Forty-first Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology

Abstract

The Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) held its annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico on January 8–13, 2008. The purpose of the conference is stated in its title and reiterated in the general information section from the conference handbook, which raises four questions for the membership’s consideration: (1) How does the public benefit from historical archaeology? (2) What are the consequences of not engaging the public or demonstrating public benefit? (3) How can we effectively engage the public? and (4) How can “public benefit” be one of the primary goals of our efforts in public archaeology? Curiously, the President’s Message, a lead item in the volume, makes no mention of the conference theme, noting rather that the conference offered “quite an array of scientific content, tours, and public sessions” along with “great activities and receptions.” My attendance as a visitor at the conference convinces me that this was not an oversight but rather reflects fundamental tensions in the practice of historical archaeology. The conference offered four essentially traditional presentation formats: (1) symposia and plenary sessions, (2) general sessions, (3) poster sessions and (4) forums. Figure 1 presents a breakdown of their relative utilizations. The small number of general sessions allotted to those whose presentations did not fit preset themes and the small number of sessions with a discussion format give the impression that the conference did not emphasize spontaneous communication, an impression strengthened when one considers that only about 20 percent of all presentation sessions were devoted to the conference theme of public benefits. Before proceeding to characterize session content, it is necessary to point out that this review is based on a sampling of the sessions that were offered. As the Society President noted in his message, there were numerous concurrent sessions and it would have been physically impossible to cover them all. I did attend the plenary entitled “The Public Benefits of Historical Archaeology,” both parts of the symposium, “Many Archaeologies for Many Publics: Public Archaeology Then, Now and in the Future,” and the Saturday afternoon forum designed to wrap up and discuss the plenary and the symposium. In addition, I sampled papers in other Figure 1