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    A Reply To "What Is Public Archaeology?": Forum

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    Adson Alcantara
    The author provides a response to an article defining public archaeology. In 3 sentences: The author agrees the model is clear but argues the definitions of archaeological commodities risk excluding materials not formally researched and knowledge not from archaeologists. They also say locating popular knowledge as dependent risks a deficit view of knowledge. The author contends critiquing processes is key to public archaeology and this role creating space for critical debate on ethics and values should be made more explicit.

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    A Reply To "What Is Public Archaeology?": Forum

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    Adson Alcantara
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    The author provides a response to an article defining public archaeology. In 3 sentences: The author agrees the model is clear but argues the definitions of archaeological commodities risk excluding materials not formally researched and knowledge not from archaeologists. They also say locating popular knowledge as dependent risks a deficit view of knowledge. The author contends critiquing processes is key to public archaeology and this role creating space for critical debate on ethics and values should be made more explicit.

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    The author provides a response to an article defining public archaeology. In 3 sentences: The author agrees the model is clear but argues the definitions of archaeological commodities risk excluding materials not formally researched and knowledge not from archaeologists. They also say locating popular knowledge as dependent risks a deficit view of knowledge. The author contends critiquing processes is key to public archaeology and this role creating space for critical debate on ethics and values should be made more explicit.

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    A Reply To "What Is Public Archaeology?": Forum

    Uploaded by

    Adson Alcantara
    The author provides a response to an article defining public archaeology. In 3 sentences: The author agrees the model is clear but argues the definitions of archaeological commodities risk excluding materials not formally researched and knowledge not from archaeologists. They also say locating popular knowledge as dependent risks a deficit view of knowledge. The author contends critiquing processes is key to public archaeology and this role creating space for critical debate on ethics and values should be made more explicit.

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    Present Pasts, Vol. 1, 2009, 53, doi:10.5334/pp.

    10

    Forum

    A Reply to “What is Public Archaeology?”


    reuben grima
    Heritage Malta

    Moshenska’s very stimulating forum article is all the more welcome for its crispness and
    clarity, reminiscent of a mathematical proof. The model is essentially put forward in two
    steps; the first defines ‘archaeological commodities’, the second seeking to define ‘public
    archaeology’ by locating it in relation to the production and consumption of those com-
    modities. The points raised on each below might only help to make the model more robust
    and more widely applicable.

    The definition of archaeological commodities


    The definition of Type 1 commodities – ‘archaeological materials’ – as ‘the material outputs
    of archaeological research’ risks excluding all material remains from the past that have not
    yet been subjected to formal archaeological research, which people may nevertheless be
    encountering in other ways in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. The relationship
    between indigenous groups and their material environment is perhaps the most salient ex-
    ample of what we would not want to exclude from the concern of public archaeology.

    There may be a similar difficulty in the definition of ‘Type 2 – archaeological knowledge and
    skills’ as ‘the intellectual aspect of archaeological work’, which work is defined in Type 3 as
    ‘the forms of work carried out by archaeologists’. Taken together, these two definitions risk
    excluding all those forms of archaeological knowledge that are not the result of archaeologi-
    cal work by archaeologists, which have had and still have immense importance in many
    historical and cultural settings. Of course it may be countered that ‘archaeologist’ here is
    meant to include anyone trying to make sense of material remains of the past, whether he is
    a person living in the Neolithic and curating the bones of his ancestors, or whether she is a
    contemporary native American transmitting ancestral myths to her children.

    Most readers will however understand ‘archaeologist’ in a very different sense, restricted to
    the contemporary, western model of archaeological practice. This concern is reinforced by
    Type 4 and Type 5, which risk locating popular knowledge as subsidiary to and dependent
    on the products and processes generated by specialists. In this sense, these definitions may
    be unintentionally subscribing to a deficit model of archaeological knowledge (Grima 2004),
    rather than one that empowers present-day ‘people without history’ (Wolf 1982). A model
    that forms the basis for a definition of public archaeology needs to be applicable beyond the
    confines of current western paradigms of archaeological practice, and to challenge those
    confines.
    Forum: grima 54

    Locating public archaeology


    That brings me to the second step in the model. The pivotal statement here is ‘…public ar-
    chaeology in the broadest sense is that part of the discipline concerned with studying and
    critiquing the processes of production and consumption of archaeological commodities’. I
    would contend that the most pivotal word in that statement is ‘critiquing’. As I am sure the
    author would be the first to agree, a central role of public archaeology is to create a space
    for informed and critical debates on the ethics, power-relations and culture-specific values
    surrounding people’s encounters with the past. Perhaps it would not be superfluous to spell
    this out more explicitly to the reader.

    References
    Grima, R 2004 Archaeological Research and the Public, 6th European Commission Conference on
    Sustaining Europe’s Cultural Heritage: from Research to Policy, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sustain-
    ableheritage/conference-proceedings/pdf/3B.2_grima.pdf. Retrieved 12 February 2010.
    Wolf, E 1982 Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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