Community Archaeology from Below: a Response to Tully

Abstract

The Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project, set up in 1996 as an experiment in 'democratic archaeology', was shaken by a major internal crisis between November 2007 and July 2008. An attempt by a small group of local people to establish top-down control over the project was defeated by a political mobilisation of the project's mass base of volunteer archaeologists and community activists. This article, by a leading protagonist, analyses the crisis and comes to some radical conclusions about the nature of community archaeology, democratic organisation, and the way in which political power is sometimes contested.