Heritage, Neighborhoods and Cosmopolitan Sensibilities: Poly-Communal Archaeology in Deerfield, Massachusetts

Abstract

Defining what is valued as "heritage" is fraught with inequities of social and political power. Though often perceived as "experts" on the past, archaeologists are just one of many stakeholders with interests in how pasts are used in the present. Twenty-first century archaeologists face the challenge of engaging in discourses and actions with diverse individuals and communities about the meaning, value, and treatment of heritage sites and interpretation. As a result, archaeologists are increasingly working to reorient and restructure social relations by engaging multiple stakeholder groups in heritage work, especially those that have been previously left out of the process. This has resulted in the collaborative study of historical contexts and processes with diverse stakeholders engaging in heritage work rooted in particular places.Heritage, used here in the broad sense to mean that which is identified as valuable and significant about the past to meet the needs of contemporary people (Carman, 2005;Graham et al., 2000;Smith, 2006), is actively constructed and engaged in the present. As such, it comprises "work," meaning activity, effort, and labor on the part of people (Smith, 2006: 13). Based on individual and collective values and social norms, people give some objects and places significance over others, elevating them to "heritage" and imbuing them with new meaning. The values and ethics of archaeologists and other practitioners in heritage disciplines (e.g., art history, architecture, history, museology) play a central role in this process. Archaeology, another kind of "work," is a physical and social intervention that shapes, and is shaped by, heritage values. It is a tool for producing material heritage and provides a means of accessing media (e.g., objects, features, sites, landscapes) through which people remember, organize, think about, experience, and otherwise deploy the past. In this essay, I suggest that cosmopolitan values -referring to a sense of interrelatedness with and responsibilities to others -can be used to orient participants navigating the complexities of "neighborhood" and other forms of community-based archaeology when multiple communities and stakeholders are involved. I decouple "community" from geography, and use "neighborhood" to refer to shared space and landscapes that root present day people. Communities form around shared interests, but they do not always share the spatial nearness that is a defining aspect of a neighborhood (as it refers to both people and places). While communities can transcend both space and time (for example, see Anderson, 1991: 9;Crooke, 2007; Smith and Waterton, 2009), neighborhoods attach people to places and localities. Neighborhoods are not bounded isolates, but rather multidimensional nodes in complex social networks. The concept of neighborhood paired with an archaeological perspective allows us to consider contemporary social, political, and economic configurations, while also considering such configurations through time. However, archaeology ro...

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Ethics and Archaeological Praxis

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“…Like many other archaeologists, in Pucar a we moved outside the comfort zone of our formal academic training in an attempt to develop a collaborative, community-based project (e.g., Ardren 2002;Castañeda and Matthews 2008;Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008;Derry and Malloy 2003;Hart 2011;Heckenberger 2008;Little and Shackel 2007;Marshall 2002;Nielson et al 2003;Silliman 2008). Typically these projects integrate ethnographic and archaeological approaches with a variety of goals: to develop research questions relevant to stakeholders groups; to reconsider aspects of archaeological theory and practice; and, more concretely, "to deepen indigenous or other local histories, revitalize neighborhoods, solidify land claims, repatriate cultural objects, or legitimate authority" (Hollowell and Mortensen 2009:4-5).…”