Community Archaeology - What's in a name?

“Community Archaeology” used to be about archaeologists “working with communities” to run their chosen projects, or helping “develop a sense of local heritage”.  
  
             
           This summes's excavations at Brora offered all ages and skills a chance to explore
            the community's industrial heritage of salt-making.

Over the last decade, Community Archaeology has grown from these top-down beginnings into a range of diverse activities, surveys initially, but nowadays also excavations, as well as monument conservation projects. Fund-raising is done by the groups themselves (sometimes from HS, sometimes not) and they then choose (or choose not) to hire professional support to supplement their own skills and labour.  It’s become much more bottom-up.

• Built-in outreach – active participation is an effective means of communicating the heritage message.
• Ownership – breaking down perceptions of elitist ownership of heritage by outside experts
• Access – to local knowledge which would remain closed to outsiders.
• Advocacy – community groups engage directly with local democracy, and can influencing decisions in favour of preservation.
• Leverage – access to resources that are closed to academic and public agencies, thus increasing the overall size of the heritage funding “cake”.

That last consideration is set to become more important as we move into a period of constrained government funding.

The need for experienced professionals remains, but increasingly working to community agendas. Bodies such as Historic Scotland will be looked to more as facilitators and funders, less as the providers of expert solutions. The importance of dedicated intermediaries, for example Archaeology Scotland or SCAPE, may therefore need to increase. A new mode of partnership is evolving, potentially a very positive and productive one – perhaps even an example of the “Big Society”.