Debra is beginning a Master's program in Anthropology at UW-Milwaukee, and she'll be doing what I did as a graduate student: learning to do archaeology while serving as the community liaison to the project.
Check out our paper abstract for the conference:
Who Even Cares? Community Archaeology on Milwaukee’s North Shore
A Paper Proposal for the Session
Collaborative, Public and Political: Archaeology in 2017 and Beyond
at
Anthropology Matters: the 116th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association
Washington, DC, November 29-December 3, 2017
by
David Pacifico, PhD and Debra Schwinn
This paper relates our experiences in the early stages of developing a community archaeological project on Milwaukee’s North Shore: the Milwaukee Community Archaeology Project North Shore component (MCAP-NS). We characterize local stakeholders and describe the archaeological interests expressed by people living on Milwaukee’s North Shore. The archaeological project examines identity, urbanism, and environmental change from the early holocene to the present. As a community archaeology project, MCAP-NS aims to engage robustly with a diverse stakeholders in order to maximize the value of archaeological research. But what are the interests, potentials, and obstacles to this kind of archaeology in the social context of a non-marginalized population? The dominant models for developing community archaeology emerge from descendent-based models of archaeological heritage or anti-colonial archaeological praxes of engaging marginalized and minority populations. These are essential and inspiring approaches to community archaeology. They may also benefit from inherent public interest because archaeological research holds the promise of cultural validation for marginalized groups. But what happens when local communities are neither primarily indigenous nor minorities? In what ways do non-marginalized local communities express interest in archaeological science, archaeological remains, and cultural heritage more generally? For archaeology to have a broad and holistic public value it is essential to gather data on, characterize, compare, and contrast public interest among, collaborative methods for, and practical experiences with collaborating with all ranges of communities.
