Community Collaboration and Other Good Intentions

Collaborative and community-based archaeological research encompasses a broad spectrum of approaches; however, there are often discrepancies between how researchers ‘sell’ the collaborative endeavour in theory and how it is actually practised. Over the past several years, I have had the opportunity to participate in several projects, ranging from those that claimed to be ‘truly collaborative,’ to research that maybe should have asked, ‘what community?’ These experiences raised difficult and disturbing questions concerning the nature and practice of collaborative and community-based archaeology. In this paper, I confront these issues as I have experienced them personally. While community-based practices aim to redress a historical and ongoing power imbalance between the researcher and the researched, constant vigilance is required lest the ‘good intentions’ of anthropologists inadvertently mask an exploitation that may be inherent in the structure of research itself. In considering the corporate nature of academia, I query whether the collaborative research model represents a break with the past, or is instead simply the same old practice dressed up in fashionable new language.     

The Azazo Project: Archaeology and the Community in Ethiopia

Abstract

In this article we discuss the motivations, aims, and preliminary results of working with a local community in Ethiopia. Trying to escape from the (neo)colonial archaeology that is still practised in Africa, this project aims to achieve a cooperative and participative archaeology. This work with the community has been one of our main priorities in our last seasons, and although we have focused on elementary school and university students, we have opened up a number of different paths to follow in future years. The experience has been very positive, and engagement with local people has helped us to create awareness about the importance of cultural heritage, hopefully ensuring the future protection of the sites.     

Alternative Pathways to Community and Economic Development: The Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project

Conventional approaches to development in areas that are experiencing economic decline invariably focus on business growth through interventions such as incentives, infrastructure development and job readiness training. This paper reports on a pilot project aimed at developing an alternative approach to community and economic development in the context of the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, a resource region that has experienced downsizing and privatisation of its major employer, the state‐owned power industry. The project was shaped by a poststructuralist concern with the effects of representation. It sought to challenge familiar understandings of disadvantaged areas, the economy, community and the research process in order to open up new ways of addressing social and economic issues. The resulting four‐stage research project was informed by the techniques of asset‐based community development and action research, as well as by discourses of the diverse economy and communities of difference. During the two‐year span of the project, four community enterprises were developed. The varying degrees of success they have met with in the four years since the project concluded highlight the critical role of local agencies such as the council in providing ongoing support for such endeavours.     

The DEEPSAL Project: Using the Past for Local Community Futures in Jordan

ABSTRACT

The Deep Past as a Social Asset in the Levant (DEEPSAL) project, conducted in 2015–16 by the Council for British Research in the Levant, examined two communities in southern Jordan, Beidha and Basta, who live near significant Neolithic archaeological sites. The project collected information on the communities’ current socioeconomic conditions, their relationship with local cultural heritage and how that cultural heritage currently benefits or hinders them. The information was used to inform nascent strategies to utilize the sites sustainably as development assets and suggest alternative strategies as necessary. The results showed that a tourism-based strategy is suitable for Beidha but there was a need to focus on basic business skills. For Basta a tourism-based strategy is currently unsuitable, and efforts should rather focus on supporting educational activities. The results of the project are presented here within the context of archaeology’s increasing interest to use archaeological resource to benefit local communities, and outlines lessons for that effort.     

Ghwair I: A Small,Complex Neolithic Community in Southern Jordan

Abstract

The past several years have witnessed exciting developments in defining the transition to food production in the Near East. In particula1; the documentation of large mega-sites has caused considerable revision in our comprehension of the trajectory of early Neolithic village life. At the same time, recent excavations at smaller villages have also provided considerable new data. One such site is Ghwair I, a small but exceptionally preserved Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) village located in the Wadi Feinan of southern Jordan.

This paper summarizes the results of interdisciplinary archaeological investigations at Ghwair I, One of the project's primary research objectives was to examine if a “rural” and “turban” (or “core/periphery”) distinction could be made between Ghwair I and mega-sites. Our findings suggest that Ghwair I was not a peripheral village linked to larger sites. Rathe1; it was an unexpectedly complex settlement that may have served as a local regional center. we also sought to precisely define the site's chronology, artifactual variability, village development, and social structure. Our results show that Ghwair I isfirmly dated to the Middle PPNB; that artifactual diversity and variability is considerable, especially amongst chipped and ground stone; that the village became increasingly complex throughout its occupation; and that social o1lJanization was sophisticated as reflected by artifacts, burials and both residential and non-residential architectural features. Finally, initiated an ecologicalstudy to determine if small settlements such as Ghwair I caused the same negative efficts as have been proposed for some larger sites. The evidence here is ambiguous, but does not suggest the same degree of human effict as at larger settlements. This paper concludes with a discussion of Ghwair I's place within the wider Neolithic world.     

Community Engagement in Historical Site Protection: Lessons from the Elmina Castle Project in Ghana

Abstract

Engaging communities in the protection of heritage means that the communities living around the heritage sites are involved in the process of identifying issues that affect the conservation of these sites and can propose ways by which they can be addressed. In Ghana, the Elmina Castle project shows close collaboration between the communities living around these slave forts and castles, the legal custodians, and other stakeholders. This case study unpicks the process to show how the existing traditional systems were approached and involved. The result of this participatory collaboration is a strategic document which will be implemented to ensure proper protection of these sites in the wake of development and modernization.     

Bridging the Social and Digital Divides in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala: A Capabilities Approach

Combining empirical evidence with Amartya Sen's concept of capabilities, this article argues that the digital divide is not merely a problem of access to ICTs. It is part of a larger developmental problem in which vast sections of the world's population are deprived of the capabilities to use ICTs, acquire information and convert information into useful knowledge. Fieldwork research including sample surveys conducted in rural locations in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh in India shows that these capabilities can only be created through large‐scale complementary interventions in economic and social development.     

Small Community Organization During the Late Formative Period in Oaxaca,Mexico

Abstract

Late Formative (ca. 300–100 B.C.) cultural systems of highland Mesoamerica have been studied mostly at the regional level and at the tops of local settlement-system hierarchies. We know much less about the structure of small communities. Data from a minor Oaxacan site are used to identify two aspects of this community's internal and external organization: 1) a status-graded set of household units headed by an elite family, itself part of a valley-wide ruling stratum, and 2) workshop-level ceramic production for supra-community consumption.     

Gender,Caste and Matchmaking in Kerala: A Rationale for Dowry

The matrilineal castes of northern Kerala consider dowry demeaning and resort to it only in ‘exceptional’ circumstances. In local discourse, dowry is transacted when women are considered ‘old’ by the standards of the marriage market, where over‐age is a condition reached usually on account of what is considered a deficit of a normative conception of femininity. Dowry is practised openly only by poor and socially vulnerable households, as the relatively affluent could mask dowry with hidden compensations. This article explores the ways in which gender mediates matchmaking and generates a residual category of women for whom dowry is openly negotiated. Open negotiation on the margins of the marriage market expose the terms of exchange in ‘respectable’ society, where matchmaking strategies reveal the emphasis placed on conjugality and on caste in the social construction of women's interests and identity. Up to the mid‐twentieth century, matrilineal women derived their identity from their natal families. The political economy of marriage in Kerala brought a new emphasis to bear on conjugality and on caste, which generated new restrictions on women and produced a rationale for dowry.     

State Life: Land,Welfare and Management of the Landless in Kerala,India

The pressing need to manage the spiralling number of landless people around the world has compelled several states to experiment with scattered land distribution programmes in combination with welfare transfers, instead of comprehensive land reform. This article examines the chasm between land demands and state responses in such contexts. Focusing on the Aralam resettlement site for the landless Adivasis in Kerala, India, it argues that management of the landless could take the form of ‘state life’ — a life envisaged by the state rather than the life the people wish to lead. Three interlinked processes are shown to shape state life in Kerala: the reduction of land to welfare, amplified welfare transfers and the mobilization of assumptions about the target population. State life enables states to extinguish simmering land struggles in the short term, but ultimately it reproduces landlessness.     

Mahishi's rage: Communitas and protest at Sabarimala,Kerala

In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India lifted the ban on females of menstrual age entering the sacred site to Lord Ayyappan at Sabarimala in the Indian state of Kerala. Violent protests, for and against, engulfed Kerala throughout the main festival and pilgrimage season of 2018–19. This article explores the major sociopolitical and cultural forces that underpinned the violent protests at one of India’s (and also the world’s) major centres of religious pilgrimage. The central argument extends Victor Turner’s thesis in The ritual process to show how the dynamics of liminality and communitas created an intense vortex of crisis of potentially sociocultural transformational effect.     

The Land of Morgan: Its Conquest and its Conquerors

The cairn on Hardendale Nab was excavated in 1986 in advance of destruction by quarrying, and this allowed the reconstruction of a complex sequence of development. Construction of the cairn appears to have begun in the Early Bronze Age, although it might have been earlier. Phase 1 comprised a simple cist burial, and small earthen mound, with a number of secondary burials made in and around the original monument. Unusual rectangular features might have been used for pyres. Phase 2 saw the erection of a round enclosure around the mound, which was later (Phase 3) filled with loose limestone rubble. Again burials, both cremations and inhumations, were cut into the rubble, and bone scattered over and amidst it, with an apparent focus on the southern part of the structure. The entire complex was buried by a further layer of rubble in Phase 4, into which several further burials, this time inhumations, were cut. The excavation produced an unusually large amount of environmental evidence, much of it associated with the use of the cairn as a roost by owls in Phases 2 and 3.     

The New York and the Josephine: two steamships of the Charles Morgan Line

Charles Morgan (1795 to 1882) was one of the most important figures in the development of steam packet service in the United States. Morgan's career spanned over a half century, during which he controlled some 117 steamships. Of the three known wrecks of Morgan Line steamers, two, the New York (1837–1845) and the Josephine (1867–1881), have been documented by the Minerals Management Service, a Federal agency responsible for overseeing the extraction of mineral resources on the Outer Continental Shelf. The two vessels document the changing technology of steam navigation through the middle part of the 19th century.