Public Archaeology

Nick Merriman, Nick Merriman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134513413
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Archaeology

Scrutinizing, in detail, the relationship between archaeology, heritage and the public, this much-needed volume explores public interest and participation in archaeology as a subject worthy of academic attention in its own right.

Examining case studies from throughout the world; from North America, Britain, Egypt and Brazil to East Africa, China and beyond, Nick Merriman focuses on two key areas: communication and interpretation, and stakeholders.

Constant reports of new discoveries, protests over the destruction of sites and debates over the return of artefacts such as the Elgin marbles or indigenous remains testify to an increasing public interest in archaeology.

For students and scholars of this archaeology, and of its relationship with the public, this will prove essential reading.

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INTRODUCTION
Diversity and dissonance in public archaeology

Nick Merriman

What do we mean by ‘the public’?

The notion of ‘the public’ in the sense of a collective body of citizens, and in contrast to the private realm, has been around since at least Roman times (Melton 2001: 1). However, there are two more specific meanings of the term, both of which are central to any discussion of public archaeology. The first is the association of the word ‘public’ with the state and its institutions (public bodies, public buildings, public office, the public interest), which emerges in the era of intensive state-formation from the Early Modern period onwards (ibid.). As far as archaeology is concerned, the opening of the British Museum in 1753 is probably the first instance of a state creating a public institution which includes the display of archaeological collections as part of its central remit.

The second is the concept of ‘the public’ as a group of individuals who debate issues and consume cultural products, and whose reactions inform ‘public opinion’ (ibid.). This notion developed during the Enlightenment, and has received its fullest treatment in Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). For Habermas, the model for an open, critical, participatory democracy was founded in the development of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century, fuelled by developments in new kinds of public spaces such as coffee houses and salons, and in new forms of communication such as newspapers and novels. Habermas’s own model has been criticised for its insufficient attention to gender, for its lack of acknowledgement that only property owners were in practice admitted to the public sphere, and for ignoring the ‘plebeian public sphere’ often dismissed as ‘the mob’ (McGuigan 1996: 24–5). However, for our purposes his work is seminal in identifying the specific historical circumstances during which a notion of ‘the public’ as a critical body external to that of the state, developed.

On the one hand, therefore, we have a notion in which the state assumes the role of speaking on behalf of the public and of acting ‘in the public interest’. This can include the state’s provision of public institutions and services such as archaeology, museums, and education. The assumption by the state that it acts in the overall public interest means that minority interests may not be represented effectively, and a high-handed approach by the state can mean that it can lose contact with the wishes of a diverse public. One of the questions for a public archaeology must therefore be how to ensure that the state, when discharging the public interest, takes into account the views of the public, and is held properly accountable to the public for its actions (see Thomas, Chapter 9, this volume).

On the other hand, the second notion of ‘the public’ encompasses debate and opinion, and is inherently unpredictable and conflictual. The public, particularly when defined as an active and multivalent force rather than the faceless mass portrayed by the critics of mass culture (e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer 1944), can have the power to influence, criticise or subvert the wishes of the state and to bring about change. Indeed the blanket term ‘the public’ is always unsatisfactory to describe a hugely diverse range of people, with different age, sex, class, ethnicity and religious interests and affiliations, many of which are in conflict with each other. Despite criticism in most texts on, for example, visitor studies, the notion of ‘the general public’ manages to survive. Its only validity for our purposes comes if it is used as a shorthand term to describe the huge diversity of the population, who do not earn their living as professional archaeologists. It is only their characteristic of not being professional archaeologists that unites ‘the public’ in our context; by any other measure, ‘the public’ does not exist. Rather, we should conceive of those who are not professional archaeologists as a shifting set of cross-cutting interest groups which sometimes have a great deal in common, but often have little in common at all.

So, the two notions of ‘the public’ – the state and the people – have always been potentially in tension. At its starkest, this tension can be reflected in a distant, largely unaccountable state apparatus for archaeology which does not reflect the diversity of views and interests held by the public, and a public which is disenchanted with the archaeology provided by the state, feeling that it does not reflect their interests, and preferring to explore other ways of understanding the past. At best, this tension can be embraced as an inevitable and positive quality of people’s relationships with the past. This would entail the state authorities recognising, respecting and working with the great diversity of public attitudes to the heritage and involving communities in the stewardship and interpretation of their pasts. These two slightly different definitions of the public also beg the question of what kind of definition is used by archaeologists. In the literature, most often ‘public’ archaeology means the archaeology regulated by the state, discharging a generalised public interest, and only occasionally does it mean the archaeology of ‘the public’, who pursue their own (different and competing) ways of understanding the past.

How is ‘public archaeology’ defined?

The term ‘public archaeology’ first entered widespread archaeological use with the publication of McGimsey’s volume of the same name in 1972. At this time, the term was associated with the practical exigencies of development-led cultural resource management (CRM), in contrast with academic archaeology and its apparent concern with wider research questions. As Jameson and Smardz Frost (Chapters 2 and 3, this volume) note, the sheer size of the USA and the vastness of its potential archaeological resource led to a realisation that the non-archaeological public had to be co-opted in the service of archaeology, if sites were to be protected or responsibly investigated. CRM was therefore ‘public’ archaeology because it relied on public support in order to convince legislators and developers that archaeological sites needed protection or mitigation, and often it relied on non-professionals to do the work. Through time, however, as archaeology became more professionalised, the ‘public’ element of this archaeology came to consist of archaeologists managing cultural resources on behalf of the public, rather than entailing a great deal of direct public involvement in the work itself. ‘Public archaeology’ in these terms in fact signalled the professionalisation of archaeology, and the relative decline of public participation. This situation has been paralleled in the UK.

The increasing professionalisation of archaeology results in a situation where the state and its agents act on behalf of the public through the planned implementation of cultural resource management strategies. Under such strategies, the public interest is generally thought to be served through the preservation of cultural resources, or their careful recording during destruction. In this way, the public interest is served not so much in the present, but more in a vaguely defined future time called ‘posterity’ when the resources, or the records of them, may be consulted. In such a future-oriented strategy, the public itself, in the sense of the citizens of today, is only served indirectly, and will rarely be involved in the archaeology itself. ‘Public interest’ elements of public archaeology include, for example, cultural resource management, site stewardship, and combating looting and illicit trade.

Over recent years, as archaeologists have come to realise that the current public’s interest in archaeology has been inadequately catered for in the CRM approach, they have begun to develop a closer interest in the public’s own interests. I have traced elsewhere the factors that have led to a new ‘opening-up’ of professional archaeology to embrace the wider public, and to the treatment of the public’s relationship with archaeology as a topic of academic interest in its own right (Merriman 2002). These have included the strong influence of archaeological theory, from Marxism to post-modernism, which has led to a recognition of the historical contingency of archaeological work, and the multivalency of interpretation. Change has also been impelled from outside the discipline, following the campaigns by indigenous and other minority peoples to have a say in the study and interpretation of their own pasts, supported by successive World Archaeological Congresses and subsequent publications. From a very different direction, change has been prompted by the fact that many of the outlets for public representations of archaeology (museums, exhibitions, heritage sites) have been forced to compete for visitors in a commercial leisure market, and have been subject to new forms of management which have involved the demonstration of accountability for public funds and value for money.

This ‘return to the public’ can also be placed within a wider context which has seen the development of the notion of the active citizen, in which choice and participation (particularly expressed through consumerism) is seen to be a major political advance: ‘Citizenship is to be active and individualistic rather than passive and dependent. The political subject is henceforth to be an individual whose citizenship is manifested through the free exercise of personal choice among a variety of options’ (Rose 1992: 159).

Perhaps in recognition of this problem, in recent years ‘public archaeology’ in the USA has, for some, grown in meaning to encompass direct public engagement again: ‘Public archaeology in America can be understood as encompassing the CRM compliance consequences as well as educational archaeology and public interpretation in public arenas such as schools, parks, and museums’ (Jameson, Chapter 2, this volume).

In other parts of the world, an even wider meaning of the term has developed, and it is this which is predominant in this book. Schadla-Hall (1999: 147) has defined it as ‘any area of archaeological activity that interacted or had the potential to interact with the public’. Ascherson, in the first editorial for a new Public Archaeology journal, has suggested that the issues in public archaeology ‘are about the problems which arise when archaeology moves into the real world of economic conflict and political struggle. In other words, they are all about ethics’ (Ascherson 2000: 2).

Public archaeology therefore also has to be rooted in the relatively sophisticated debates which have now emerged around heritage in general. This debate has evolved in recent years away from a rather fruitless bipolar argument between the critical ‘heritage baiters’ and the populists celebrating heritage from below (Samuel 1994) to a more nuanced treatment of issues of identity and conflict, coupled with those of tourism and economics. Graham et al. (2000: 22) have usefully defined heritage – and by implication the archaeological heritage – as a duality of both economic and cultural capital, which exist in tension with each other: ‘tension and conflict are thus inherent qualities of heritage, whatever its form’. We should not perhaps be surprised that most of the public aspects of archaeology are about conflict, or what Tunbridge and Ashworth (1995) have called ‘dissonant heritage’, because archaeology is ultimately about the development of cultural identities, and therefore it is inextricably bound up with politics. We see this most clearly in the actual destruction of physical remains in civil war (Layton et al. 2001) and in the contestation over the right to own, or interpret archaeological materials (Layton 1989a; Fforde et al. 2002; Simpson 1996), but we also see it in local disputes about destruction of sites or rights of access which do not make the national media. The dissonance of archaeological heritage has been most thoroughly explored by Skeates in his volume Debating the Archaeological Heritage (2000), which is replete with examples of conflict, debate and negotiation over all aspects of archaeology.

The field of public archaeology is significant because 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. This broader definition of public archaeology opens up a space in which to discuss not just archaeological products (such as educational programmes, museum displays and site tours) but the processes by which meaning is created from archaeological materials in the public realm. Public archaeology, therefore, embraces the debates which open up between the official provision of archaeology on behalf of the public, and the differing publics which have a stake in archaeology, who will often debate amongst themselves about the meanings and values of archaeological resources.

What is the purpose of engaging with the public?

The deficit model

In examining why professional archaeology has found it important to engage more closely with the public, it is instructive to look at the development of the movement to promote the public understanding of science. The Royal Society’s 1985 report, The Public Understanding of Science, put forward two main arguments for the importance of better public understanding. The first argued that Britain as a nation would gain economically if its workforce were more familiar with science and technology. The second was that improved public understanding created better citizens, who were more able to make informed democratic decisions in a culture increasingly pervaded by science (see Irwin and Wynne 1996). As MacDonald (2002: 49) notes:

There was here an implicit casting of the public as deficient and misguided in its present ‘lack of uptake’ of science – a ‘deficit model’ of the public, whose failing had to be repaired by getting more science ‘out’ or ‘across’ the boundary from a specialised and relatively bounded world into that of the largely ignorant masses.

There is something of this ‘deficit model’ pervading many of the arguments given for the importance of public archaeology. If we engage with the public, the argument goes, then more people will understand what archaeologists are trying to do, and will support their work more. Public education, it is argued, will attempt to promulgate the message that stewardship of archaeological resources is important, and ‘correct’ misapprehensions about the past propagated by the lunatic fringe (see McManamon 2000). To this extent, the ‘deficit model’ of public archaeology sees the public as needing education in the correct way to appreciate archaeology, and the role of public archae...