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Archaeology has a long tradition of volunteer involvement but also faces considerable challenges in protecting and understanding a geographically widespread, rapidly dwindling and ever threatened cultural resource. This paper considers a newly launched, multi-application crowdsourcing project called MicroPasts that enables both community-led and massive online contributions to high quality research in archaeology, history and heritage. We reflect on preliminary results from this initiative with a focus on the technical challenges, quality control issues and contributors motivations.

This article reviews existing case studies in the 'crowd-funding' of community archaeology, as well as offering preliminary results from a small-scale experiment conducted alongside the wider crowd-sourcing efforts of the MicroPasts project (http://micropasts.org). In so-doing, it also considers the possible role of a hybrid reward-and donation-based model for micro-financing collaborative archaeological research. The article concludes with a summary of the key lessons drawn from experiences of crowd-funding archaeology so far, and highlights their particular implications for community archaeology.

There are thousands of forgotten archaeological archives hidden away in repositories all over the world, lost worlds where many scholars have toiled away for years, trying to record every detail and bit of information available about rare and precious archaeological objects in an attempt to bring order and understanding to an almost incomprehensible past. This paper discusses how these archives can be approached through Huhtamo’s definition of media archaeology as a ‘historically-attuned enterprise’ that involves ‘excavating forgotten media-cultural phenomena’, focusing on the MicroPasts digitization project. It is shown that greater utilization of digital media simply changes and extends the terms of engagement, accessibility, and flow of information from antiquated archaeological archives to the community and back again.