Introduction

In the Introduction to this book, Vergunst and Graham argue that heritage is ‘about relationships created through inquiry, between past, present and future, between people, and between people and things’. Here, we explore how this definition of heritage challenges attitudes and beliefs in relation to what school is for and the nature of curricula. Archaeology in the school-based community opens up possibilities for learning beyond the limitations of a content-driven model of learning. This chapter also considers the impact of the historical investigations carried out by children as heritage interpretation in the wider community.

We present a contextualised case study of work carried out in a small rural primary school in North-East Scotland. This work saw a community-based landscape researcher's commitment to the full engagement of non-experts in the planning, investigation and dissemination of landscape research being taken up by a head teacher, her staff and pupils. Participants recognised and valued the strength of putting children in charge of shaping what and how they learn. The experiences of all concerned resonate with Margaret Carr's (2005: 42) argument that ‘education is an ontological project’ because it is not just knowledge and skills that are generated, but also ‘shifts and developments in identity’.

Elsewhere in this book, discussion of community and co‑produced heritage research have problematised issues of power in relation to knowledge, skills, decision-making and voice. In this chapter, ways of knowing through co‑production and enskilment are explored through the narrative of a school investigating the history of their village with the support of landscape researcher Colin Shepherd, a head teacher, Jane Murison, along with her staff and pupils at Keig Primary School, and a lecturer from a School of Education, Liz Curtis. Using this material, we argue that the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) (Scottish Executive, 2004) is brought into being as a dynamic lived experience for all participants.

The ongoing nature of the work discussed here is significant. It began in 2011 as an element of the ‘Bennachie Landscapes Project’ (see Vergunst et al, Chapter One, this volume) that grew to incorporate a series of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connected Communities projects.

Introduction

Can community-based archaeology achieve different outcomes from more traditional academic approaches? In this chapter, we explore how ways of knowing the past can alter significantly when the landscape is encountered through collaborative means. This not only provides a contrast to how archaeology is usually practised in university and professional settings, but also enables us to study relationships with landscape that span the past, present and future. If one of the preoccupations of mainstream archaeology is the regular chronological ordering of human activity from the past towards the present, working through a collaborative methodology opens onto how time and landscape can be understood in different ways.

Research co‑design and co‑production undermines assumptions that the past is a stable and static entity that can be uncovered and read off layer by layer (Simonetti, 2013). By drawing inspiration from phenomenological perspectives on landscape, we explore how notions of time develop from practical and discursive involvement with landscape. These forms of activity can become mediums through which senses of the past, present and future emerge; in this way of thinking, ‘time duration is measured in terms of human embodied experience of place and movement, of memory and expectation’ (Bender, 2002: S103). We would add that plants, animals, seasonality and other non-human components of landscape also create senses of time. As ways of life in the landscape continue, so time itself unfolds, not simply according to a calendrical or ‘clock’ chronology, but also by way of the qualities of being past, present and future, and of duration and change. This holds true for the ways of practising archaeology as much as for the landscapes of the past being described. Field research on ‘heritage’ can serve to provoke notions of temporality beyond standard associations with the past and beyond the imposition of a sense of time onto the landscape. By these means, collaboratively exploring the past of a landscape is also an emergence of its present and future.

Our argument builds on ideas and practices of community and public archaeology. Dalglish (2013: 2) writes that community archaeology:

Introduction: why do materials matter?

Historic research, by its very nature, questions old narratives and develops new ones. Material goods, taken out of circulation perhaps for decades, centuries or millennia, will re-enter society, receive new roles and have effects wildly different from those anticipated by their makers. The site of a former house or castle, once rediscovered, provides the impetus for a range of experiences that may change the worldview of a person or community. In heritage – by which we mean the process of being involved with the past – communities make links between past, present and future through encountering materials in different forms. Heritage thus provides a particularly good field for exploring how ‘the material’ matters in collaborative research.

On one level, we need to recognise that all life is of course material and that it happens within places and landscapes. Archaeologist Ian Hodder describes the ‘entanglement’ of humans and things, which are forever making and being made by each other. He writes: ‘humans get caught in a double bind in relation to things since they both rely on things (dependence) and have to reproduce things they have made (dependency)’ (Hodder, 2012: 112). We make things, and so we have to go on making things. That these human-thing interdependent relations happen in places, and that such places matter, is also fundamental (Casey, 1996). Places are the very grounds in which life, including social and cultural life, happens. When we consider materials in the legacies of collaborative research, we need to acknowledge the constant interaction between people, things and places.

In the particular cultural world of the professional heritage sector and parts of academic heritage studies, however, the ‘material’ world is frequently divided from the non-material with reference to the ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’. The recognition by UNESCO in 2003 that heritage could take the intangible forms of performance, ritual, voice and movement was a shift from a preservationist discourse focused on historic sites and objects. The way was opened towards valuing contemporary cultural practices and performances along with the means by which they persist through time. While this is clearly important, the problem is that materiality (that is the quality of being material) becomes associated with just the monumental and the iconic (Smith, 2006).