17th November 2013, 03:30 PM
P Prentice Wrote:i would guess that the majority of us with careers in uk archaeology, got involved because we were interested in what could be found out to explain our own lives. when i look at an excavation in my home town i feel a direct link with the lives revealed, i retain that sense of ownership with sites in my home county and for the most part with sites in my home country. having had a reasonable education i am aware that my dna will probably show that my ancestors probably came from further afield and when i look at excavations in asia or africa i am interested, but not really to the same extent as if i was looking at sites for which i have greater knowledge. even though i know that actions and events in apparently foreign cultures can have directly influenced the very archaeology i find so compulsive, i also know that my tiny head is not capable of knowing enough about the global site for me to invest sufficiently the time required.
so how do we instil a sense of ownership in more diverse audiences and encourage more diverse participation? my guess would be that we have to become more relevant to more of us. by telling better stories. stories require story tellers and story tellers need to emerge from behind context sheets, pot reports and radiocarbon dates. when was the last time you told a good story?
I've disagreed with much of what you've said on these forums, but can't fault what you say here. The story is the important part - it's what I look for - a ditch (sorry, linear feature...), a sherd of pot, a burial or a wall is all well and good, but it's the context, the story and the ways we connect to that story that is the fascination. This debate has been raging a while though, hasn't it: what role can those in the commercial sector take, if indeed they should take at all, to help convey that story and bring it alive to a wider audience. I still think this is the crux of so many problems that get mentioned in relation to the business of archaeology. Too much is kept in house, a secret for the select few. And then we wonder why politicians want to discount archaeology from the planning process, why the public don't notice when their heritage is being lost for good and why huge swathes of the population don't even know we exist. But is there an appetite to address this within the balance-sheet world of commercial archaeology?