Archaeology is said to add value to development, creating a deeper sense of place, community identity as well as 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 article 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 participation by the public 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.

No abstract

Introduction-problem solvers and solution seekers When the science fiction author William Gibson remarked that "the future is already here-it's just not evenly distributed" (Rosenberg 1992), he could well have been describing the archaeology profession. From algorithmic newsfeeds to always-on mobile technology, archaeologists live their non-professional lives in an increasingly networked digital environment. However, contra Galeazzi and Richardson-Rissetto (2018), it is a stretch to think that the internet has impacted archaeological method and practice to quite the same degree. The pervasive use of digital technology may well be entrenched in archaeology, leading some to proclaim "we are all digital archaeologists now" (Morgan and Eve 2012: 523). But in contrast with initiatives from outside the discipline that draw on collaborative models of ' open', 'peer-to-peer', or ' distributed'

No abstract

No abstract