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.

Recent developments in the realm of public and community archaeologies have stressed the need for plurality, diversity, and a lessening of archaeological authority. The mandate for such community engagement is often the well-meaning desire to redress historical imbalances and injustices through prioritising the interests of certain constituencies. Yet the ethics of deciding what history will be prioritised and whose voice should be heard are often left unconsidered in our haste to demonstrate the social value of archaeology. In Northern Ireland, a host of anniversaries relating to the still contested past of the early 17th-century Plantation period lend an unavoidable immediacy to archaeological engagements. Drawing from several recent fieldwork projects, the parameters of a critical, publically-engaged Plantation-period archaeology are considered. The challenges of developing public archaeology in Northern Ireland, where both communities (Catholic and Protestant) have equal voices if oppositional historical memories, has the potential to critically inform the practice of ethical community engagement in other locales.

INTRODUCTION: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

Public and community archaeologies clearly have their deepest roots in places characterised by structural, societal inequities, and in situations where archaeologists have sought to be inclusive. As such, community archaeology has been generally theorised within a postcolonial, post-processual framework whereby we as scholars and trained professionals question our own position and our right to talk about the past of ‘other people’, often disenfranchised people.

Community archaeology is a rapidly expanding approach to archaeological research. Whilst the archaeology itself is central to individual projects, issues of community' may be heavily implicated within the agendas of many project partners. In this paper, I will argue that community archaeology projects are complex arenas in which a variety of agendas are interwoven within both the planned activities and the unplanned outcomes that occur during the life of a project. Drawing on ethnographic evidence of community archaeology from my recently completed doctoral research as well as from recent experience of the proactive delivery of community archaeology I will focus on the role of memory in relation to both the initial design of community archaeology projects and also the ways in which projects come to be understood and valued by those who have supported and/or participated in them. I will identify projects as being arenas in which aspects of social memory can be central to much that is both planned for and experienced by participants. The rediscovery of lost memories, the preserving of fragile memories and the making of new memories will be shown to be especially significant within the narratives aggregating around individual community projects. I identify ‘living memory'sites as being especially meaningful and effective for community archaeology and argue that the event of a community archaeology project can serve as an arena for the construction of community in the present.