In its origins as a concept, wealth in people depended on the circulation and accumulation of rights and obligations among and over the living. But if a person is a source of wealth, what happens when the person dies? Would the person be excised from the relationships upon which wealth in people depends, or might his or her wealth remain accessible to the living? To address this question, we present the case of Oberlin Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina. The cemetery was the core of Oberlin Village, a freedperson's African American community founded in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, development threatens historic resources surrounding the cemetery, but a community organization founded by descendants and neighbors has emerged to preserve and promote their heritage. We are a group of anthropologists, geologists, and historians who live and work near Oberlin Village and who collaborate to help this organization achieve its goals. Here we report how our efforts to document the cemetery's history have bolstered their advocacy and validated their claims to wealth in the people buried there. Thus we show how wealth in people extends to the dead when graves and the people within them are potent sources of value for the living.
There are calls from cultural resources professionals, academics, and diverse stakeholders for multivocality, co-creation of knowledge, and inclusion of local and traditional input in the management of cultural resources situated on public lands. Yet, associated communities often have little control or influence on management of their heritage sites beyond mandated consultation, particularly for archaeological sites. In a US National Park Service (NPS) context, managers are guided by standardized criteria, existing data management systems, and policy-and eligibility-based funding streams. The influences of these criteria, systems, and policies are particularly powerful when managers are prioritizing action for climate adaptation, as policy guidance focuses attention to cultural resources that are both significant and vulnerable to climate stressors. The results of a variety of engagement activities with Tribal Nations and NPS staff show that the co-creation of knowledge requires meaningful engagements, the valuing of Traditional Knowledges, and bridging the culture-nature divide. This paper highlights successful examples of such meaningful engagements and offers strategies for collaboration between NPS and citizens and staff of Tribal Nations in climate change adaptation planning for cultural resources on public lands.Scholars are increasingly documenting the exposure of archaeological sites to climate change stressors (e.g., Rockman 2015; Anderson et al. 2017;Sesana et al. 2021). The impacts of these stressors to sites are also being documented with more frequency, such as the deterioration of materials from increasingly salinized soils and extreme fires (Gruber 2011), and the displacement and loss of materials and physical context from erosion caused by riverine flooding (Howard et al. 2016), storm surge (Pollard-Belsheim et al. 2014), and sea level rise (Papadopoulos et al. 2021). On federal lands, climate adaptation guidance for archaeological sites typically focuses on minimizing physical deterioration or loss given management agencies' mandate of responsible cultural heritage stewardship (Rockman et al. 2016;Venture et al. 2021). Yet, many archaeological sites require unique climate adaptation planning and management because of their connection to sovereign Tribal Nations 1 and the consequential sensitivity of data and locational information associated with pre-contact sites (Wildcat 2013). In this commentary, we explore the challenges of climate change adaptation planning for archaeology sites and the opportunities for agency staff and the citizens and staff of Tribal Nations to steward cultural heritage sites located on public lands.
This article provides a model for an international community-based public history field experience, with a university student-engagement case study in two Belizean communities. This field experience involved experiential education, interdisciplinary research, and collaboration between American and Belizean university students; public history, cultural anthropology, and archaeology scholars; US and Belizean institutions; and community residents. Resulting products included an exhibit on local cultural heritage and educational materials. I explore the pedagogical and scholarly utility of the field experience to public history by discussing the educational process, project results, and student learning outcomes, highlighting in particular contributions to student training and engaged scholarship.
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