Archaeologies-Journal of the World Archaeological Congress最新文献

This introduction to the special issue on ‘The Public Archaeology of Working Class Communities’ situates the articles included in this issue within the broader context of identity-based public and community archaeology efforts. Despite being part of the gender-race-class classical triad of identity, class has been repeatedly overlooked as it’s own area of focus within community engagement and public archaeology. This introduction calls for public archaeologists to more thoroughly consider their engagement strategies with working class communities in order to ensure our projects capture the intersectionality of our stakeholder and descendant populations. Finally, the articles in this issue are examined as case studies that are already highlighting some thematic trends within working class public engagements.

This paper presents a reflection on the process and results of an historical archaeological investigation of a South Australian colonial farm garden. It demonstrates how the researcher allowed the emotions evinced by the site’s history as a frontier site to contribute to the discussion of the research’s relevance for contemporary Australian society, related to themes of national identity and coming to terms with a colonial past.

This short piece offers a perspective on the current archaeological educational format, evaluating topics like access to field school and the cultural resources management (CRM) job market. From personal experiences, a similarity is shown between the gap in skills of what is learned in academia and what is applied in a job. The COVID-19 pandemic plays a critical role in accessing field school experiences and preparing undergraduate students for graduate studies. Solutions range in the smaller scale of mentor–mentee relationships where expectations and lack of expertise can be evaluated to prepare the graduate student for further educational paths or the job market.

Eckley Miners’ Village in Luzerne County, PA is a living history museum that holds significance for many residents of the surrounding area. Preserving and interpreting the homes and buildings that once made up an anthracite coal mining patch town, the site retains ties to many in the area who either lived in Eckley or are related to people who lived in Eckley. However, since 2000 the population demographics of Luzerne County have changed drastically. As the population changes, the ways the public perceives the relevance and value of local history stand to change as well. Utilizing archaeology for new interpretations of local history, and as an outreach method, the Anthracite Heritage Program provides a case study of local history sites adapting to shifting population bases and working to incorporate non-descendant groups into the preservation of local histories.

The working classes have been overlooked as a population that could benefit from social-justice-oriented critical public archaeology approaches. The Anthracite Heritage Program sought to address this gap by targeting educational attainment among students in the historically working class, chronically underserved northeastern Pennsylvania region. Public archaeology initiatives to promote interest and knowledge about undergraduate education revealed that the archaeologists’ greatest contribution was our own (class-based) knowledge of the intricacies of university admissions, funding, and life in the United States. In this way, the project ended up serving underserved communities in the ways that they needed help the most: securing the knowledge to attain class mobility.

This paper seeks to make a methodological contribution to archaeological praxis of working-class communities, by illuminating how archaeologists engaged in oral history-based research with working-class communities may encounter authenticity as a methodological challenge. Drawing on my PhD research on football as cultural heritage, I will outline the authenticity problem I encountered in the field: the enforcement of hierarchies of authenticity by working-class football supporters in response to their experiences of marginalisation in the sport. In turn, I will not only show how these hierarchies of authenticity present obstacles to researchers looking to build relationships of trust with their subjects, but also indicate some solutions to this authenticity problem. Specifically, I will show how it is often useful to “fall into the trap of authenticity” as a researcher and use the interview setting to discursively construct yourself as authentic on your subject communities’ own terms.

A sacred landscape is the result of human actions and subsequent evolution, and it serves as a backdrop for mytho-historical re-enactments. While it may represent divinity and spirituality, sacred landscapes are more complex, dynamic landscapes built on an unrestrained and chaotic environment, which can be easily juxtaposed for a tourist destination. This paper investigates this ideology based on the study of two major holy towns, Vrindavan and Pushkar. Both sites, being integral parts of the Hindu pilgrimage, invite millions of pilgrims annually who are in search of spiritual essence and religiosity. However, along with pilgrimage these towns also tend to act as a destination for leisure tourism, leading to an inevitable contestation between the urban development process of these towns, where the spatial structure of the town is constantly evolving to cater the need of the pilgrims as well as the tourists. It can be evidently observed in both the towns that the spiritual construct that once bound the meanings associated with several spiritual activities have lost their significance over time. These towns are now heavily promoted as tourist destinations, which has altered the traveling patterns and have led to a widespread commodification and commercialization of culture and heritage, where new emerging economic buoyancy and changing urban structure have given these towns homogeneous character and have led to the formation of new building typologies, which dominate the skyline of these towns, ultimately resulting in the formation of numerous commodified sacred spaces with diminishing place-based memories and associations. Using a case study approach and a purposive survey method, the paper attempts to identify such contested areas that impede not only the spiritual experience of these cities but also the community's well-being, eventually proposing strategies to regenerate and reclaim these spaces in such sacred territories.

The place of local community vis-a-vis non-local agents (science, state, capital) in relationships with archaeological heritage is explored through an oblique reading of a singular case in northwestern Andean Argentina. While the conflicts of territorial interests can be predicted to grow alongside the evolution of the entangled relations within the territory, the Saujil situation shows a different picture. Heritage claiming is starred by local inhabitants consciously independent from non-local discourses and powers, albeit adopting actions that are locally seen as “officially” correct (cleaning the vegetation, signalling, guiding tourists). Delving one step deeper, this research asks not just for the particular contents of local knowledge (if local or non-local) but for the local ideas about what knowledge is. Within this local theoretical framework, the relationships with the ruins developed along the process of heritage claiming described so far can be seen within a territorialized bodily, concrete and intersubjective regime of care, a local theory of relatedness.

Visual analysis of artefacts is fundamental to archaeological research. However, learning and teaching the methods of artefact analysis can be challenging, since it is cognitively demanding to observe and explain how visual processing works. This paper addresses this challenge and evaluates eye movement modelling examples, a newly adopted method for teaching visual analysis of artefacts. Educational materials containing recordings of eye movements of experts analysing artefacts have been shown to be beneficial to students. As a consequence, they may boost the accessibility of archaeological knowledge, both for in-class and remote education.