Innovation festival SESSION: delivering public benefit

 

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Timetable - see below for abstracts

Chair: Kate Geary, CIfA

Presentations

Public benefit in developer-led archaeology: More than just knowledge creation?
Kate Faccia, MOLA

UK archaeology largely takes place within the context of development.  Both planning legislation and developer social value frameworks mandate that development should provide a balance, if not net benefit, to local communities that are impacted by works.  And, in publicly-funded work (e.g., infrastructure), this onus is arguable stronger, as funding is via direct taxation. Public benefit from archaeology is usually attributed to knowledge creation, but is this enough? Or, should we be doing more to make a positive impact?

Social Impact Archaeology: Pontefract Castle and the Gatehouse Project
Brendon Wilkins, DigVentures

Archaeology is said to add value to development, creating a deeper sense of place, community identity and improving health and wellbeing. Accentuating these wider social values has been welcomed by a profession keen to broaden its public relevance and legitimacy and protect its seat at the table in modern cultural life, but how much, if at all, do the public actually benefit from developer- led archaeology? Benefits to individuals and communities from archaeology projects are often abstract, intangible and difficult to attribute, and the discipline arguably lacks a satisfactory frame of reference around which it can express and design for these additional social values. Drawing on the language of social impact investing, this paper will explore how the UK based collaborative platform, DigVentures, has addressed this challenge. It introduces a Theory of Change’ and ‘Standards of Evidence’ framework to account for the impact of development-led archaeology programmes, illustrating the causal links between activity and change through the case of the Pontefract Castle Gatehouse Project. It is complemented by a short documentary film exploring the spectrum of digital and physical opportunities for the public to participate alongside a team of highly experienced professional field archaeologists, demonstrating how development-led archaeology can be designed to accomplish far more than answer a planning brief.

Link to accompanying film: https://youtu.be/rr_bc_aTsk8

Bronzeon: Learning by Gaming
Prof. Dr. Philipp W. Stockhammer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München & Co-Director of Max-Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean

Archaeology has a long story of success in attracting public interest. However, archaeological research still faces the problem of how to attract a young audience in spite of their interest in pseudo-archaeological movies such as “Indiana Jones” or “Tomb Raider” and civilization build-up/strategy games like “Civilization” or “Age of Empires”. In order to reach out to this group, I developed the computer game “Bronzeon” where players gain insights from latest archaeological research by gaming together with the computer game producer Milkroom Studios GmbH and the marketing agency elfgenpick. The game is designed for school teaching, and has developed into a frequently used way to teach prehistory in Bavarian high schools. It was designed for tablets and mobile phones in order to reach a broad audience and freely available for download for Android and Apple. As edutainment game, it acts as a subliminal, but historically precise, pedagogical tool because of its science-based background. In my talk, I will present the game, its scientific background and its current use in high school education.

Reaching new audiences with digital publication
Judith Winters, Internet Archaeology

The open access journal Internet Archaeology has always been a publication willing to collaborate with authors and experiment with form in order to reach new audiences.  I will briefly describe some recent and forthcoming publication projects and approaches, to show that we can and should look beyond the familiar structures of "traditional" publication to tell our archaeological stories.
 

Who is the ‘We’ in the archaeological community of practice?
Perry Gardner, University of Durham

Academics, contractors and heritage professionals are in the minority. Time to acknowledge, validate and accredit the contributions of ‘volunteers’ (including those who pay for the privilege of excavating). An enabled, empowered, upskilled ‘volunteer’ community is the key to publicising, promoting, building on projects and research, creating a powerful local and national voice.

Additional information
Registration will close one hour prior to the start of the event. The Zoom link will also be sent out to all registrants one hour prior to the start of the event.

Contact us
If you have any questions at all or require any assistance in registering or accessing this event, please contact the CIfA Events team: conference@archaeologists.net