Community Archaeology Under Scrutiny

Community archaeology claims to offer the public an opportunity to become engaged with and involved in the interpretation and understanding of the past. It has been claimed that this interactive approach, one of participation in the archaeological process, develops both intangible and tangible values from the past for individuals and communities in the present. Such values range from educational to economic and from political to social; however, these supposed results of community archaeology have yet to be critically analyzed.This paper focuses on assessing the values of community archaeology excavations from a range of contexts in both the UK and USA. Case studies include Shoreditch Park (London), Grosvenor Park (Chester), Hungate (York), and Brayford (Devon) in the UK, and Mitchell (South Dakota) and Muncy (Pennsylvania) in the USA. It sets out a self-reflexive, ethnological methodology for evaluating what community archaeology really does. Furthermore, this paper assesses whether the theoretical values claimed by community archaeology projects were successful in practice. These case studies offer insights into how a multi-disciplinary approach to the practice of community archaeology can contribute to building a comprehensive understanding of the archaeological sites, and enable a more culturally relevant interpretation of the past to be espoused to the public, placing past sites firmly in the present. The potential of community archaeology to have a lasting impact on society's values, understanding and the future preservation and management of heritage, needs to be more broadly recognized.