Editorial

Welcome to Issue 10.01. We are back again and we are in double digits, meaning that JCAH is now in its tenth year of spearheading community-based approaches to heritage and archaeology from around the globe. In keeping with this, the current issue, the first of 2023, wishes to celebrate a new year in scholarship, in innovative community practice, and in community resilience across the board. As our world, professional and personal spheres, shape themselves to a new articulation of human interaction and as travel opens up again, we find ourselves wondering what lessons have been learned in the process. We are confident that as we adapt (or resist?) to what some have – somewhat reductively – named ‘a new normal’, we can make out the outlines of new possibilities, new and more insightful ways of doing things, as it were. We might even further define and buttress more flexible and possibly wider reaching means of generating and communicating the findings and teachings of community-centred projects. There are three major hurdles to our optimism, however: the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the pervasive and lingering presence of COVID-19 on a global scale and the ever-deepening environmental crisis engulfing our planet. First, we do not yet live in a post-pandemic world and the strain of the pandemic is also evident in some of the research presented over the pages of this issue of JCAH. We also recognize the privilege of living and working in countries where accessibility to vaccines, the lack of conflict and the presence of stable democratic governments are supporting the return to a more hopeful and safer social world. However, we are acutely aware that not all our readers and colleagues enjoy most or any of the aforementioned privileges. Secondly, we extend our full solidarity to Ukrainian colleagues and the people of that country – as well as the many Russian colleagues and citizens, who do not support the Russian government’s act of imperial aggression. At the start of a new year and virtually one year after the invasion officially began, we hope that 2023 brings a resolution to the conflict or – more realistically – relief to the people of Ukraine and the region more generally. Thirdly, like with the COVID pandemic, we are conscious that those of us living and working in the global north and west – wile part of the heaviest polluters of the planet – do not yet feel the full brunt of the environmental changes that are already impacting millions of lives – especially in the global south – on a daily basis. So as temperature records keep getting broken and extreme weather event become the ‘new normal’ we also hope that 2023 sees a watershed in how the global community deals (justly) with the causes of this situation. Among these hurdles, we believe that bottom-up community perspectives can offer solutions and shine a light on how we can live better together in a more sustainable, peaceful and healthy world. In this issue of JCAH we find excellent examples of what our practices and discipline(s) of community-led and community-fronted archaeology, heritage and knowledge construction can look like in 2023. We start and end our issue with fascinating insights from Australia; a country in which one of us (De Nardi) used to reside and work, and that was shut off from the rest of the world until very recently. The first is a research paper by Collett, Knowles and Pocock, in which the authors explore the complex heritage of European era huts in Tasmania. They consider the real and perceived social value of this World Heritage Site above its prestigious designation, revealing the contradictions within.