Reflecting on evaluation in public archaeology

Abstract

As heritage professionals, our community-facing projects are embedded in the politics of cultural heritage and reverberate throughout the communities where we work. The only way to know if archaeological outreach and community engagement are working is to ask stakeholders, and there is growing support in our community of practice to further develop this aspect of the field. There is also increasing pressure to use evaluations, particularly standardized impact assessments motivated by neoliberal political critiques, to argue that archaeological projects are legitimate uses of economic resources. As the field continues to develop more robust mechanisms of self-assessment, we urge further reflection on whether our assessment of successful outcomes balances differing expectations and definitions of success, requirements of funding institutions, willingness of the participants, and needs of the practitioners. Are we working towards assessments of our own satisfaction with work done, the satisfaction of the dominant political forms of cultural value, the formal procedures of our funding streams, or the experiential and educational needs of the non-professional with whom we engage? We present a picture of the institutional contexts of US and UK public archaeology evaluation up to this point and propose ways to move forward that address the ethical underpinnings of public archaeology practice while strengthening the institutional visibility of public archaeology work.

People, places and performance: Reflections on community archaeology and heritage in north-east Wales

“…Whilst individual well-being impacts are increasingly captured through standardized methods such as the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS), or the UCL Museums Wellbeing Measures Toolkit, there is no parallel standardized or data-driven methodology to evaluate broader community and indeed wider public impact (Thomson and Chatterjee 2013;Warwick University 2019). This is despite growing calls from funding bodies, embodied in legislation such as the Well Being of Future Generations Act in Wales, to measure exactly this kind of impact as a yardstick for the social and economic value of archaeology to the public (Ellenberger and Richardson 2019). Therefore CPAT has begun to develop some mechanisms to try and collect more meaningful data, which are being trialled through these projects in north-east Wales.…”

“…Previously, the criteria for 'success' was almost exclusively a numbers game, where raw figures of participants or visitors were the yardstick of outreach efficacy. Public archaeology has been critiqued for a lack of rigour and transparency when it comes to evaluation, a deficiency that enables a lack of reflection and refinement of practice (Ellenberger and Richardson 2019). With a more critical approach to community archaeology, reframing it as an opportunity for using archaeology as a powerful tool for social, economic, health and well-being impacts, CPAT as an organization has begun to redefine 'value' and reposition itself within the communities it works within.…”

Digital Public Archaeology at Must Farm: A Critical Assessment of Social Media Use for Archaeological Engagement

“…Engagement with audiences is a key component of digital and physical public archaeology. However, there is often no requirement for projects to undertake evaluation and little published work on the subject (Ellenberger and Richardson 2018;Ripanti 2020;Wilkins 2019). When evaluation does take place, there is typically no clear consensus on methods or measurements of engagement (Ellenberger and Richardson 2018).…”

Decoupling ‘Open’ and ‘Ethical’ Archaeologies: Rethinking Deficits and Expertise for Ethical Public Participation in Archaeology and Heritage

“…Two assumptions central to this claim, which are widely held in the sector, are that public participation and archaeology are both inherently good things. I argue that these assumptions inhibit critical self-reflection and go some way to explain the prevalence of 'sunny' accounts of collaborative archaeological projects (Halperin 2017) and the shocking lack of structured evaluation of public archaeology projects (Ellenberger and Richardson 2018). In doing so, I echo Sara Perry, who draws on critiques from both archaeology and museum studies to argue that 'the evidence that archaeology and heritage institutions are genuinely realising their social justice, active democracy, and civil welfare aims is questionable, if not non-existent' (Perry 2019).…”