Session: #311

Round table (without formal abstracts, only list of confirmed discussants / session co-organisers to be provided)

In the past 15 years, the engagement between archaeology and the public has intensified and, as a result, a growing number of countries have moved from top-down approaches that aim to increase community awareness of cultural heritage through modification of dissemination practices, to more dynamic and inclusive approaches that entail the active collaboration of citizens and archaeologists.

The new path has inevitably forced practitioners to rethink how and why we do archaeology and has eventually led to a shift of focus from top-down, often enforced, box-ticking exercises, to projects aimed to empower local communities.

While the outcomes of archaeological research are regulated by specific legislation and publication responsibilities, the truly collaborative practice poses often unresolved location specific challenges. True collaboration requires the permeability of boundaries between “professional” and “community member”, which can become extremely difficult to transcend when working with marginal groups, even in cases in which researchers are both community members and professionals.

Yet, marginal groups, i.e. communities that can be regarded as critical for socio-economic reasons (e.g. peripheries of urban centres, groups characterized by a lack of access to facilities, that have not been integrated, are illiterate or new), are those that could benefit more from collaborative research projects in which the cultural heritage can become a trigger for creating and/or reinforcing integration. The aim of this session is to bring together researchers who have been working with such communities so as to address, through specific cases studies, challenges and attempts at overcoming them.

public archaeology, collaborative research project, marginal groups

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Simona Todaro (Italy) ¹

Evangelos Kyriakidis (Greece) ²