About This Project

For my master's thesis, I will conduct a mix of community archaeology and ethnographic survey/interviews which will address the question, "what is gained by doing community science?", specifically in archaeology. In addition to informing the development of public-professional relationships in future public archaeology projects, this project's findings will also help define the relevance of archaeology (and in some ways, science in general) to the public at various scales.

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What is the context of this research?

In the last two decades, many archaeologists have started to bring the public to archaeology through interpretive or interactive archaeological projects and programs. While many of these projects are widely viewed as successful, no rigorous assessment has been made of how well they actually worked or what the experience meant to anyone involved, and none of these projects follow any sort of standard guideline. Furthermore, sciences like archaeology can have substantial relevance to the lives of practically everyone - be it learning more about the place you are from or your ancestors, or discovering new techniques to battle hunger, natural disasters, or climate change. Therefore, archaeologists could do more to be aware of how to best bring archaeology to the community and vice versa.

What is the significance of this project?

This project is unique because it uses anthropological methods and theory to test, measure, and assess the impacts and outcomes of doing community archaeology. The project will provide data on public perceptions of, and feelings towards, science and archaeology that could be readily integrated into a broad range of educational, scientific, and curatorial efforts. While the results of the archaeological portion of the project will address an important issue to local archaeology (the efficacy of different surface survey methods in different terrain types), the anthropological portion will provide information about both archaeologists' and lay persons' expectations and experiences working on a community science project. This information will be extremely valuable for guiding future projects.

What are the goals of the project?

The archaeological portion of the project involves a mix of archaeologists and members of the public working several days in the field to address the research question about surface survey methods. The ethnographic portion of the project seeks to assess what people gain from doing archaeology and involves interviews of everyone involved in archaeological fieldwork. Additional interviews of archaeologists not involved in fieldwork, as well as a baseline survey of Portland area adults (target N=200-300) will provide a variety of background data that will be used to further understand the results from the interviews conducted with the participants in the archaeological fieldwork. Through analysis and triangulation, meaningful patterns and themes will become apparent.