Social Impact Archaeology: Pontefract Castle and the Gatehouse Project

Abstract

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.

Phylogenomic analysis of Wolbachia genomes from the Darwin Tree of Life biodiversity genomics project

“…To functionally annotate predicted genes, both Prokka (version 1.14.6) [ 80 ] and InterProScan (version 5.54–87.0) [ 81 ] were run. The synteny plot of the biotin locus was created using gggenes [ 82 ]. All six genes that make up the biotin locus (BioA-D, BioF, BioH) were individually aligned with mafft in automatic mode (version 7.490) [ 72 ] and transformed into a concatenated nucleotide alignment.…”

Evaluating wellbeing with participants in archaeology at the National Trust

“…According to Ellenberger and Richardson (2018, 66), 'these range from detailed assessments of learning outcomes to explorations of the impact on well-being and socio-economic profiles to simple collations of visitor numbers and anecdotal comments collected during events and activities' with 'an overall lack of methodology, a heavy reliance on anecdote, and sometimes crude measures for success'. Other writers suggest that there is an absence of an agreed evaluation methodology for more quantitative approaches to understanding (Sayer 2018;Wilkins et al 2021). A report commissioned by the national wellbeing organisation What Works Well (Pennington et al 2018), conducted by a team from the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, University of Liverpool, and the Centre for Health Promotion Research, Leeds Beckett University, concluded that the evidence pointed towards a positive impact on individual and community wellbeing.…”