Edited by Gabriel Moshenska

Public archaeology is all the New Territories, lying around the periphery of direct research into the remains of material culture … All of them are about the problems which arise when archaeology moves into the real world of economic conflicts and political struggle. In other words, they are about ethics.

(Ascherson 2000: 2)

any area of archaeological activity that interacted or had the potential to interact with the public – the vast majority of whom, for a variety of reasons, know little about archaeology as an academic subject.

(Schadla-Hall 1999: 147)

it studies the processes and outcomes whereby the discipline of archaeology becomes part of a wider public culture, where contestation and dissonance are inevitable. In being about ethics and identity, therefore, public archaeology is inevitably about negotiation and conflict over meaning.

(Merriman 2004: 5)

public archaeology in the broadest sense is that part of the discipline concerned with studying and critiquing the processes of production and consumption of archaeological commodities.

(Moshenska 2009a: 47)

a subject that examines the relationship between archaeology and the public, and then seeks to improve it

(Matsuda and Okamura 2011: 4)

The aim of this book is to give the reader an overview of study and practice in the field of public archaeology. It offers a series of snapshots of important ideas and areas of work brought together as an introduction, albeit an inevitably brief and incomplete one, to one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of the wider archaeological discipline. Read the book from cover to cover and you will have a good working understanding of public archaeology as a complicated, rich and diverse field, as well as knowledge of some of the most significant and iconic examples of public archaeology in action. Dip into a specific chapter and you will find a concise and insightful introduction to one aspect of public archaeology with case studies and a list of readings to develop your understanding. However you use this book I am confident that you will emerge with a better understanding of what public archaeology is, why it matters and what you can do about it. First, it is necessary and useful, drawing on the quotes above, to ask what we mean by public archaeology, and to examine some of the different ways it has been defined.

The archaeologist and television personality Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the first prominent public archaeologists, stated

I was, and am, convinced of the moral and academic necessity of sharing scientific work to the fullest possible extent with the man in the street and in the field.

(1955: 104)

and that

It is the duty of the archaeologist, as of the scientist, to reach and impress the public, and to mould his words in the common clay of its forthright understanding.

(1956: 224)

Wheeler was an eloquent promoter of the ideals of public archaeology, but he was by no means the first or the only archaeologist of his time to look beyond the material remains of the past to consider the place of archaeology in the world (Moshenska and Schadla-Hall 2011). Public archaeology has remained at the core of archaeology throughout its history and into the present, touching upon every aspect of the discipline worldwide. Public archaeology straddles the great divides within archaeology between professional, academic and amateur; between the local and the global; between science and humanities: in fact, the study and critique of these disciplinary divisions is a vital part of what public archaeologists do.

One of the challenges of public archaeology is its all-encompassing nature: its study draws on fields as diverse as economics, international law and film studies, while its practice ranges from grassroots community activism to high-level international diplomacy. All of this makes public archaeology difficult to pin down and define. Public archaeology exists in a tangle of overlapping definitions and interpretations, many of them the result of different national, organisational and educational traditions: public archaeologists from Greece, Argentina, the UK and Japan will often find ourselves talking at cross-purposes, even with the best of intentions.

For now, I will offer a working definition for this chapter at least, as given in the title: ‘practice and scholarship where archaeology meets the world’. This book is for people who want to better understand this point of contact between archaeology and the wider world, and for those who want to work at that interface. Within this definition of public archaeology, we can include a multitude of things: local communities campaigning to protect local heritage sites, archaeologists and producers collaborating to create television documentaries, metal detector users bringing their finds for identification and recording at local museums, archaeological heritage sites researching their visitor demographics, students studying the depiction of prehistoric women in comic books, and plenty more. The aim of this chapter is not to lay out the boundaries of the field; rather, it is to give an overview of the principles of public archaeology that underlie this book and to outline the values of studying and practising public archaeology.