Archaeology, Heritage, and Social Value: Public Perspectives on European Archaeology

Abstract

This article presents the key results of a major survey carried out by the NEARCH project on the public perception of archaeology and heritage across Europe. The analysis focuses on three main points of significance for contemporary archaeological practice. The first is the image of archaeology and its definition in the perception of the general public. The second concerns the values that archaeology represents for the public. The third focuses on the social expectations placed on archaeologists and archaeology. The NEARCH survey clearly indicates that there is a significant public expectation by Europeans that archaeology should work comprehensively across a broad range of areas, and that cultural heritage management in general needs to engage more with different archaeological and heritage groups.Keywords: public archaeology, social engagement, European survey, NEARCH project Since the 2008 economic crisis, thinking about archaeology and the social sciences has changed. The repercussions of the market crisis have affected academic disciplines as well as the global economy (Schlanger & Aitchison, 2010). The primary impact on archaeological practice was the cessation of construction work, and underfunding of archaeological projects. In some countries (e.g. Spain and Ireland), commercial archaeology companies which depended on new investments were European Journal of Archaeology 21 (1) 2018, This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use. (Eogan, 2010;Parga-Dans, 2010). In other countries (such as Poland) the quality of archaeological work decreased (Marciniak & Pawleta, 2010). Today, archaeology and archaeologists find themselves in a new market reality. While the effective communication of the value of archaeology for understanding ourselves and our society has always been important, it has also been greatly magnified by the crisis. Therefore, the ideas championed by the public and community archaeology domains are even more critical within archaeological practice (see Merriman, 2004;Högberg, 2007; Madsuda & Okamura, 2011; Kajda et al., 2015;van den Dries, 2015). Other factors, such as institutional crises (Marciniak, 2015), denationalization of heritage policy and practice, the growing importance of multinational enterprises (Willems, 2014), greater emphasis on the human rights perspective on memory and identity (Hodder, 2010), or the relationship of heritage to well-being and quality of life (Abel et al., 2010) also have an increased influence on archaeological research. These multifaceted developments have been identified among practitioners in the field as a reflection of more general transformations with...

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