This volume publishes a selection of the papers first presented during the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology's conference Engaging the Recent Past in 2010. This introductory paper seeks to situate the other contributions, placing them in the context of wider processes including the rise of Community Archaeology and the development of an explicit political consciousness in archaeology. Concepts of multivocality and memory are discussed, as are the practices of public participation. The paper argues that a more critical stance needs to be taken towards public engagement in archaeology, and this is discussed in relation to concepts of power and social learning. The paper advocates a move beyond limited participation (confined to particular activities, such as participatory site identification and recording, and to the context of particular projects) and it advocates a move towards participatory governance. Here, the archaeological professional is repositioned as a collaborator engaging with others, including relevant public constituencies and the relevant authorities, in the social process of creating knowledge about the past and defining how historic environments and relationships will be protected, managed or transformed in the future.

INTRODUCTION

This volume arises from the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology conference Engaging the Recent Past: Public, Political Post-Medieval Archaeology (Glasgow, September 2010). The focus of the conference was the contemporary context of post-medieval archaeology: the values, politics and ethics associated with the recent past, and the practices through which we engage with and construct that past. Contributors to the conference considered these issues in relation to the post-medieval and contemporary archaeologies of the U.K., Ireland and a number of other countries, and they promoted positions founded in a variety of philosophical, political and practice traditions.

This paper will demonstrate, through recent fieldwork and political engagements in Bristol, UK, the potential for a new kind of political archaeology, not based around supporting political parties or facilitating community engagement as ends in themselves, but around creating new kinds of knowledge that can be used to influence politics and politicians at the highest levels.

INTRODUCTION: BIG P, SMALL p

The phrase ‘archaeology is a political act’ is oft repeated, but as with any such definitive phrase when used in academia each word of it has multiple meanings. For instance ‘is’. Well, it is not always. Archaeology can be a political act and archaeology sometimes is a political act, but this is not a universal truth. Likewise, the word archaeology can be taken different ways itself. There is academic archaeology, private sector archaeology, public archaeology, uses of archaeology in the heritage industry and so on, all intrinsically connected, but each with nuances different enough to render universality meaningless.

In this paper, I wish to put forward the possibility that contemporary forms of archaeological thought and investigation can play a role in redefining the ways in which politicians engage with ordinary people and everyday situations. Rather than limiting themselves to facilitating community engagement or lobbying politicians in relation to heritage legislation, I will suggest that archaeologists can move towards using their unique perspectives on contemporary and historic environments to change the very way in which the connection between archaeology and politics is conceived, using archaeological investigation to understand the nature of contemporary politics and feeding this back into the wider system of policy making instead of merely working within the confines of existing heritage legislation.