Archaeological Engagement Research Articles

Chapter 12 Changing Tides: Tribal Engagement in Oregon's Coastal Archaeology

ABSTRACTArchaeology on Oregon's Coast has been largely limited in scope and has lacked the holistic viewpoint of Indigenous coastal history. Investigations began in earnest around 1930 with avocational archaeologists like Marcus Seale interested in expanding their “trophy item” collections. The male dominated field of professional archaeology began to evolve in the 1940s and 1950s with investigators from varying backgrounds, like Luther Cressman who began studying the material culture of the Oregon Tribes as if they were an extinct group. The 1970s push for federal recognition brought increased Tribal involvement and collaboration with archaeologists such as Richard Everett “Dick” Ross. Unfortunately, Tribes remain largely uninterested in archaeology as Indigenous individuals and communities continue to be left out of the narrative. Cultural resource professionals at major institutions continue to curate “cultural material” under the aegis of science and resource protection while arguing against the repatriation of material based on either lack of skeletal components, or a misguided understanding of “affiliation” and of Native views of sacredness. We explore the legacy of our predecessors and how we as archaeologists must take a more comprehensive Tribal perspective approach to understanding Oregon coastal history and more respectfully manage legacy collections.

Archaeological encounters: Ethics and aesthetics under the mark of the Anthropocene

AbstractWhat legitimizes archaeological work in an age of global climate change, socio-political crises and economic recession? On what topics should archaeology focus its research questions, and what forms of archaeological engagement are not merely justifiable but able to make a difference in light of such challenges? Today, there is a tendency, we argue, that archaeological responses to current challenges are expected to align with a specific mode of conduct, political stance and genre, where, for example, a very particular notion of activism, responsibility and ethics is dominating. There is no denial that current challenges call for immediate instrumental reactions, but we contend that valuable reactions can – or even must – vary, and that more fundamental and slow ontological and epistemological change should also be nested within these responses. In this article, we explore what it means to care – what it means to be concerned – in the Anthropocene through archaeological practice and aesthetic engagement. By highlighting the relations between ethics and aesthetics, we explore ways in which we get in touch with the objects of concern, placing undecidability and speculation as dispositions equally important to urgency and impact.

Why do students enrol in archaeology at Australian universities? Understanding pre-enrolment experiences, motivations, and career expectations

This study presents the first data on a level one archaeology student cohort, exploring their demographic composition and motivations for enrolling, as well as external stressors such as health and caring responsibilities that may influence student study goals, retention, and needs. A survey of 107 students enrolled in introductory level archaeology units at 13 Australian universities was undertaken in Semester 1, 2021. The results show a diverse cohort by age, gender, and educational background. Consistent with the professional Australian archaeological community, there is little diversity in the ethnicity of enrolled students. Further, many respondents reported having caring responsibilities, and both physical and mental health concerns. Students were motivated to enrol both for general interest and future career pathways; however, there was a poor understanding within the cohort of Australian archaeological job opportunities. These results indicate that there is clearly much to be done in public archaeological engagement and outreach in Australia. What is required of the Australian archaeological community is a concerted effort to improve how the discipline is taught and learned across all levels of education, and a collaborative approach to designing teaching methods suitable for our modern student cohort.

The Mernda VR Project: The Creation of a VR Reconstruction of an Australian Heritage Site

The Mernda VR Project is an initiative exploring the possible applications of hypothetical digital reconstructions of rural archaeological sites, with an aim to investigate the efficacy of virtual reality as a means of fostering engagement and interest in rural archaeology. Expanding on existing work into digital reconstructions of heritage, the Mernda VR Project investigates whether reconstructions of heritage sites may be suited to smaller scale rural archaeology, in addition to reconstructions of grander, more well-known, and celebrated heritage sites. While reconstructions of renowned heritage sites certainly have their place in engaging the public with heritage, rural archaeological heritage is at a greater risk of destruction resulting from development, or simply being overlooked and forgotten in the public imagination. As such, these sites are in greater need of innovative representations and outreach programs for their cultural merit to be understood and remembered. The Mernda VR Project used physically based rendering (PBR) to create a life-like digital environment reconstructing a mid-19th century cottage and flour mill in Mernda, Victoria, and imported the 360 degree rendered images into the virtual tour software 3DVista for development into an interactive educational experience. The experience is planned for display in local schools to assess the practicability and effectiveness of such displays for increased engagement, interest, and comprehension compared with more traditional educational displays. This article is intended as a technical guide for the creation of 3D modelled archaeological displays using polygonal modelling and PBR textures and structure from motion photogrammetry, and acts as a companion piece to Keep (in press) which provides further details on the historical context of the reconstructed site.

Introduction to Special issue

Introduction to Special issue

Unmarginalising participation in the past and enabling engagement in community archaeology – Dig Greater Manchester, a case study

ABSTRACT Dig Greater Manchester (DGM) was a large archaeological community engagement project operating within Britain during the years 2011 to 2016. Its scope and scale were designed to assess the impact of enabling local communities and individuals to acquire and enhance heritage skills and awareness of heritage-based practices, whilst also contributing to the exploration of the city region's experience of industrialisation. This paper looks at the ways in which the Dig Greater Manchester community archaeology project set about recording the impact of the project, especially individuals with learning disabilities. The community impact data was captured through specifically designed feedback questionnaires, one-to-one interviews with adult volunteers, one-to-one interviews with disability volunteers, and the input of psychology researchers from the University of Salford. The results provide data on how archaeology engagement activities can help to build communities and break down barriers, but also highlight areas where the project could have been improved.

Post-conflict ethics, archaeology and archaeological heritage: a call for discussion

AbstractEthics are fundamentally important to all forms of archaeological theory and practice and are embedded within many professional codes of conduct. The ethics of archaeological engagement with conflicts around the world have also been subject to scrutiny and debate. While archaeology and archaeological heritage are increasingly viewed as significant elements of post-conflict work, with much to contribute to rebuilding stable and secure societies, there has been limited acknowledgement and debate of post-conflict ethical issues and challenges for archaeologists. This paper is intended to stimulate discussion around major ethical issues, the problems and possible ways forward for post-conflict archaeology and archaeological heritage.

Connecting Archaeological Practice with the Senses and Past Bodily Experience: Introduction to “Sensory Engagement in Historical Archaeology”

Connecting Archaeological Practice with the Senses and Past Bodily Experience: Introduction to “Sensory Engagement in Historical Archaeology”

Politics, Migration and Race. A Conversation with Yannis Hamilakis

Yannis Hamilakis is Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the Brown University (USA). His main research and teaching interests are the socio-politics of the past, the body and bodily senses, the archaeology of eating and drinking, the ontology and materiality of photography, archaeology and nationalism, archaeological ethnography, and critical pedagogy in archaeology. Yannis is committed to an anthropologically-informed, critical archaeological engagement with past and present material culture, and to the inter-disciplinary nature of archaeological work. This position recognises the historically contingent nature of archaeology as a device of western modernity, as well as its potential to enable a critical and reflexive experiential encounter with the material world. He also believes on a politically committed archaeological and academic practice, devoted to social justice.

British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770-1870, edited by Sutapa Dutta

Reviewed by: British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770–1870 ed. by Sutapa Dutta Meg Dobbins (bio) British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770–1870, edited by Sutapa Dutta; pp. viii + 246. London and New York: Routledge, 2020, $160.00, $44.05 ebook. Part of the Routledge Research in Gender and History Series, British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770–1870 offers an intimate glimpse into the understudied lives and writings of a diverse group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women travelers. The collection will be received enthusiastically by anyone interested in travel writing, women’s writing, and historical and cultural studies of the British Empire. Perhaps the greatest strength of this fresh and accomplished volume is its gendered elaboration and historical situating of the inherently nebulous genre of travel writing in the context of British imperialism. The editor Sutapa Dutta makes the case in a framing introduction that women’s travel narratives from 1770 to 1880 provide a “unique refractive perspective” on British imperialism and colonial rule (4). Beyond recovering the words and experiences of individual women writers of the period (itself a worthy undertaking), this volume aims further to illuminate British women’s contributions to Western and Anglocentric forms of travel, mobility, and imperial knowledge-making in the decades during which Britain was coming into imperial world power. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of how British women travelers contributed to and shaped important cultural, scientific, religious, and material colonial discourses of the time. The chapters offer close readings of an impressively diverse range of public and private genres of women’s travel narratives including travel guides, memoirs, published and unpublished letters, cookery, and proto-ethnographic and archaeological writings on a variety of stimulating topics. In a laudable effort to track British women travelers across as many continents and in as many countries as possible, the volume is broken down into three parts focused on Europe, the British colonies, and settler colonies. There are many benefits, and perhaps a few inevitable drawbacks, to this geographical structuring. In the first section especially, on British women’s travels throughout the Continent, it is not always clear how or if the chapters intend to address the larger questions of British imperial knowledge and discourse posed in the introduction. In an excellent chapter on Elizabeth Inchbald’s travels to France in 1776, for example, Ben P. Robertson makes the persuasive case that Inchbald appropriated French culture for British consumption. The word “colonise” is deployed here as a synonym for other kinds of adaptation, translation, and cultural commodification (21). Yet when the chapter turns to consider Inchbald’s awareness of specific colonial affairs in India (evidenced by her 1784 drama The Great Mogul and the fact that she briefly contemplated immigrating to India herself), the differences among these various modes of appropriation come to feel significant. How—and why?—did Inchbald’s capitalizing on French culture lay the groundwork for her cultural colonization of India later on? In this chapter, as in Barbara Tetti’s fascinating account of British archaeological engagements with Roman monuments and ruins, British views of India are touched on but not fully integrated into discussions of British tourism throughout the Continent. Reading Tetti’s chapter, one wonders how the nascent archaeological notion of time that evolved in travel narratives written by Katherine Elwood and Judith Montefiore in Rome further developed when these women headed to the Middle East and India; unfortunately, this chapter concludes right at this exciting juncture before any such connections [End Page 461] can be made. Overall, then, while chapters in this section of the book do a wonderful job recovering the writings of individual writers and elucidating forms of British identity and culture that emerged vis-à-vis women’s travels in the Continent, the larger framework of the British Empire sometimes falls out of view. One of the central and perhaps most provocative contentions of this volume is that British women’s travel writing was not “radically different” from men’s. As Dutta asserts, it is “time to relinquish the idea of searching for a ‘feminine’ perspective in the writings of women writers, or a ‘feminine’ perspective of the world” (6). Some...

Inebriation and the early state: Beer and the politics of affect in Mesopotamia

Many early states were deeply invested in alcoholic beverages. In focusing on the political instrumentality of these beverages, however, archaeologists have often lost sight of what makes them such an effective tool of statecraft. People seek out alcoholic beverages because of their inebriating potential, their ability to transform people, places, atmospheres, and events. In this article, I consider the politics of affect and the enduring connection between alcohol and the state-making project. I argue that alcohol has long served as an affective technology, a means of intervening in the affective domain. As a case study, I explore the evidence for beer in early Mesopotamia. A fundamental element in the state-making arsenal, beer was recognized to produce distinctive effects on imbibers, but this affective dimension has often been sidestepped in the archaeological literature. I approach the topic from two angles: (1) Mesopotamian perspectives on the effects of beer consumption and (2) key parameters that need to be clarified if we are to assess the role of beer as affective technology. I hope that the roadmap laid out here will help to spark deeper archaeological engagement with the affective dimensions of alcohol consumption and the politics of affect in Mesopotamia and beyond.

Deep Pasts – Deep Futures A Palaeoenvironmental Humanities Perspective from the Stone Age to the Human Age

Coagulating around the powerful notion of the Anthropocene – the proposed geological epoch of the ‘Human Age’ where anthropogenic control of and impact on nature has taken on a magnitude comparable to geological forces – many traditional humanities disciplines are rediscovering the environment as worthy of study. Ranging from eco-criticism to anthropology and history, the environmental humanities are dismantling the founding divisions of academic practice that confine the study of ‘nature’ to the natural sciences and the study of human society, culture, politics and ethics to the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, one of the environmental humanities’ most central contributions has been in addressing the question of ethical involvement when it comes to environmental research that has relevance in contemporary climate change debates. With its long-standing multidisciplinary affiliations and its many outstanding case studies of how the climates of the deep past have affected contemporaneous communities and how these communities have shaped their environs at various scales, archaeology is well positioned to contributing here. Yet, the discipline has so far been marginal in these emerging debates.
 Drawing on selected examples from the deepest Stone Age to the most recent past, I attempt in this keynote paper to bring together thoughts about the national framing of archaeological practice, archaeological interpretation and heritage management in Europe with preoccupations about past societal collapse under the umbrella of environmental ethical concerns. I argue ultimately that archaeology and archaeologists should involve themselves in environmental debates and in the wider environmental humanities project, but caution that due diligence is needed when operating in such a politically charged debate where personal and political opinions can swiftly overshadow supposedly objective scientific attitudes – and where sceptics stand ready to exploit such bias as well as the uncertainties inherent in archaeological knowledge. Nonetheless, archaeologists can contribute to contemporary climate debates in numerous ways: by writing articles for journals that influence policy-making upstream, through museum practice, and by collaborating with practitioners implementing climate change adaptation measures. I provide brief examples for these avenues and suggest that by re-orientating environmental archaeological engagements in this way, the discipline can gain relevance and recognition, and make a genuine contribution to solving one of our times’ most wicked problems.

Imperial Collapse and Christianization in Patristic Scholarship during the Final Decades of Colonial Algeria, 1930–1962

The work of H.-I. Marrou is important in historiographic accounts of the development of patristic studies and late antiquity. From the 1930s onwards, Marrou and his peers made use of material evidence from North Africa produced by the rapidly professionalizing discipline of archaeology. Archaeological engagement with the past was determined by the wider colonial context in which these excavations took place and this shaped the representation of late ancient Christianity, particularly the life and work of Augustine of Hippo. At the same time, however, Augustine's work gave Marrou the means to challenge France's prosecution of the Algerian War.

Archeologia odpowiedzialna społecznie. Działania z zakresu public i community archaeology w Polsce

This paper aims to conceptualize the social role of archaeology and archeological heritage in the present. First, it contextualizes the legal and doctrinal background of activities aimed at dissemination of cultural and archaeological heritage and engagement of public in initiatives around that heritage. Next, it describes main forms of outreach activities undertaken by archaeologists in Poland. Further, it presents community-oriented activities and initiatives that go beyond education of the general public about the past and archaeology and strive for engaging local communities in activities centered around archaeology and archaeological heritage. It concludes with a statement that openness of archaeology to society helps to strengthen its current social position, determines its role in the world and attributes social activities of archaeologists with a deeper meaning.

Digital Public Archaeology at Must Farm: A Critical Assessment of Social Media Use for Archaeological Engagement

Digital public archaeology is increasingly exploring social networks as platforms for online outreach initiatives. Despite a growing body of literature concerning archaeological engagement on social media there are few examinations of such applications in practice. This research critically assesses the current discussions surrounding archaeological social media use before exploring commercial digital outreach at Must Farm, Cambridgeshire. Quantitative examinations of the project's Facebook metrics and qualitative comment analyses are employed to assess whether audiences were meaningfully engaged by these online strategies. The research concludes there is substantial value in using social networks to communicate archaeology and provides recommendations for future applications.

Collaboration, engagement, and Cambodia: Archaeological perspectives on cultural heritage

ABSTRACT Community archaeology remains rare in Southeast Asian archaeology, where most archaeological engagement takes place within archaeological heritage management contexts. What should community archaeology look like in countries whose majority populations trace their ancestry directly back to monuments which generate huge revenues and whose archaeological records are under threat through development and looting? This article introduces Cambodian archaeological heritage management and its relationships to cultural tourism and economic development. Understanding Cambodian heritage management requires familiarity with UNESCO World Heritage designations which drive many developments in the country. Two primary areas of concern for both community archaeology and more top-down approaches are: (1) the challenges of working between multiple and competing stakeholder agendas, in which local community voices are rarely heard; and (2) the impact of specific management decisions on local communities. Case studies from across the region offer examples of solutions to these seemingly intractable obstacles.

Final Thoughts on Beiläufigkeit

The essays in this theme section demonstrate clearly the diversity and complexity of a topic that seems negligible in practice but emerges as important upon further reflection—the incidentalness of things. In this brief afterword, we highlight three of the themes addressed by all or most of the contributions, which we suggest are of particular relevance when considering the place of the incidental in our archaeological engagements.

Aboriginal stone artefacts and Country: dynamism, new meanings, theory, and heritage

The nature of Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to stone artefacts has changed since the 1960s in southeast Australia—now recognisably more social, spiritual, and immediate than temporally distant, historical, or technological. Drawing from published accounts and on personal experience, I suggest that this change, while not universal, is directly linked to compliance or developer-funded archaeology as a dominant mode of archaeological investigation and Indigenous engagement. Archaeological surveys and excavations have enabled Aboriginal individuals and groups to return to parts of Country not visited for one or more generations and thereby they have been able to renegotiate the contemporary meanings of and emotional responses to stone artefacts found there. Such remaking of meanings is being done in ways that contrast with the dominant and disenfranchising Western scientific values typically ascribed to cultural objects by archaeologists and government cultural heritage laws and regulations. In this paper, I explore the opportunities and challenges faced by those concerned with more-than-scientific meanings of stone artefacts. More generally, and based on the evidence presented here, I argue that Indigenous ontologies of care now stand in opposition to state sanctioned ontologies of harm.

Landscape Heritage at Çadir Höyük: From Cartography to Digital Imagery

Abstract Studies of archaeological cultural heritage typically focus on sites and landscapes threatened by military conflict, while threats from development and urban expansion are often more common. Excavations at Çadır Höyük began as a salvage campaign in advance of the construction of the Gelingüllü Dam—a modern infrastructural project. While our team has been excavating since 1994, the mound of Çadır Höyük and our host village of Peyniryemez have been recorded in maps and historical documents stretching as far back as the fifteenth century CE. This article examines the history of archaeological engagement at the site with a particular focus on the cartographic and visual record.

Community heritage engagement in Malaysian archaeology: A case from the prehistoric rock art site of Tambun

ABSTRACTThis paper explores contemporary community archaeology in Malaysia, through the consideration of the example of the Prehistoric Rock Art site of Gua Tambun. It argues that the existing community heritage engagement practices often disenfranchise the community knowledge, and highly conform to a top-down model. Our investigations pointed out a pattern of exclusion, where the inclusion of the local community in management planning is relatively low. In response to these issues, a community-driven engagement project has been developed, aiming at encouraging community engagement in archaeology through the promotion of awareness and local capacity building centre to a bottom-up approach. Given that the community-driven approach is a relatively new alternative in Malaysian heritage management, this project serves as a new benchmark to reflect the pitfalls and prospects in the future delivery of a sustainable conservation management of archaeological heritage in Malaysia.