Archaeology as Intellectual Service

A new publication is out now in the journal Archaeologies about our approach to community-engagd archaeology in Calabria! The piece showcases the experience of a community-engaged approach to the archaeology of sustainabilty in the San Pasquale Valley in southern Calabria.

The BMAP team waiting one morning in central Bova Marina to meet with a stakeholder about working on his family's property in the San Pasquale Valley. Continual and ongoing meetings with community members and stakeholders is an important component to our community-engaged approach to this research.

By combining ethnographic and traditional archaeological methodologies, we have been working to establish our project as a community-serving, rather than strictly research-generating, endeavor. Our experience is showing that truly collaborative projects offer new opportunities for knowledge production and knowledge presentation about the past, and provide a platform to turn what is normally mainly an academic pursuit of knowledge into a service to stakeholders and collaborators who make the work possible in the first place. Prioritizing process, while acknowledging the need for academic capital, makes us better scientists and offers the key to engaged scholarship.

SDSU MA student Yesenia Garcia (left) and University of Notre Dame PhD student Nicholas Ames (right), demonstrate some of the perks of a community-engaged approach to archaeology in Calbaria, Italy!

Citation

Chesson, M.S., Ullah, I.I.T., Iiriti, G., Forbes, H., Lazrus, P.K., Ames, N., Garcia, Y., Benchekroun, S., Robb, J., Wolff, N.P.S., Squillaci, M.O., 2019. Archaeology as Intellectual Service: Engaged Archaeology in San Pasquale Valley, Calabria, Italy. Arch. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-019-09376-5.

Download

You can download the paper here.

Funding

The research was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.