Introduction

The Caerau and Ely Rediscovering Heritage Project (CAER) was established in 2011 and is a collaboration between Cardiff University, Action in Caerau and Ely (ACE) (a local community development agency), local schools, residents and community groups. From the beginning, the guiding principle has been to actively involve community members, groups and heritage professionals in the co‑production of archaeological and historical research. The project is focused on the Cardiff suburbs of Caerau and Ely. These are two of the most socially and economically challenged areas in Wales, but are also home to several regionally and nationally important heritage sites, including a large multivallate Iron Age hillfort. Until the instigation of CAER, these sites had received little attention and potential opportunities for using heritage to enhance social and economic well-being were entirely unrealised. Over the last seven years, the project team have employed a range of co‑productive strategies to harness this potential through the process of researching heritage. In many respects, CAER has been effective precisely because it is about ‘Heritage as Action’, as it is framed in the Introduction to this book. The knowledge, energy and creativity of local people have been expressed through their engagement both with their local heritage and each other. It is the action of doing things together that has led to local communities having a stake both in the archaeology and the future of the area. As the project has developed over such a length of time, there have been many successes, but also many challenges. Using CAER as a case study, this chapter reflects on the potentials and problems of long-term co‑production with communities, providing a range of perspectives from the key project partners involved.

Caerau and Ely: housing and heritage

Caerau and Ely are adjacent electoral wards on the western fringe of the city of Cardiff, although they possess a strong sense of shared identity and are often referred to together as ‘Ely’. The housing estates that constitute each ward are home to a combined population of around 26,000 people. At the beginning of the 20th century, the area was essentially rural. However, after the First World War, with growing demands for housing to provide ‘Homes fit for Heroes’, in 1922, the area was taken inside the Cardiff City boundary and a programme of house building was initiated founded on ‘Garden Suburb’ principles.

Before – and after – the psy sciences confected the regulatory concept of ‘addiction’ for their police paymasters, ordinary people have sought out intoxication, sometimes by way of the psychoactive drugs which that concept has been used to prohibit. Critical scholarship on the discourse of addiction has been profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault's work and it has also long been known that Foucault took drugs, especially during what was arguably his most intellectually inventive period. This chapter looks again at Foucault's use of drugs – the kind of life and community he got from them – in conjunction with the powerful critique his work frames of the dominant securitarian consensus under neoliberalism today, according to which such unauthorized drug-use is inevitably addictive and pathological. The stimulant pre-text for this discussion is the auto/biographical portrait by Mathieu Lindon, Learning What Love Means (2011). At a discreet distance of some three decades, Lindon paints a rich picture of the six years of his mid-twenties spent ‘alongside Michel’, in the philosopher's entourage gravitating around his flat on Rue de Vaugirard, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, not far from Montparnasse. During these last six years of Foucault's life (1978–84) Lindon shows the philosopher as a friend, mentor, benefactor, and queer father figure. The author is a prolific novelist, journalist, and son of Jérôme Lindon, director of the avant-garde press Les Éditions de Minuit. Much of the book is concerned with a reflective parsing and intertwining of these two paternal influences: the aloof biological father and the permissive queer father, although this exploration of queer kinship and the difficult relationships between gay men and their fathers is a dimension of the book I gladly leave to other readers. My focus instead is on the autonomous social structures of care and meaning-making elaborated in an environment in which the consumption of illegal drugs is more the norm than the exception: opium, LSD, and heroin are all taken in significant quantities, by Foucault as by his younger entourage. The reader who searches the book like a sniffer dog with an abacus will lay paws on references to at least twenty-four occasions on which one or more of these substances are used.

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).

Introduction

Cardiff is Europe's youngest capital city and its history is dominated by its maritime and industrial heritage. However, nestled deep in one of its suburbs, surrounded by houses, is one of the most important, yet little known and understood, prehistoric monuments in the region: Caerau Hillfort. Enclosing an area of more than five hectares, Caerau Hillfort is by far the largest Iron Age hillfort in South Glamorgan. The housing estates that surround the hillfort are home to more than 25,000 people – the largest social housing estates in Wales. Despite strong community ties, the people who live there are burdened by significant social and economic deprivation, particularly high unemployment. Its large population once fed major manufacturing employers, such as Ely Paper Mill and Ely Brewery, but since these closed down in the 1980s, employment in the area has never recovered. This is partly due to poor educational attainment – almost 50% of 16- and 17-year-olds have no qualifications and only 2% of school leavers go on to university (compared with 95% in other areas of Cardiff). Moreover, a disturbance in the summer of 1991 was publicised in the media as a ‘riot’ and led to a deluge of long-lasting bad publicity that has given these communities a real stigma, particularly in the minds of residents of wider Cardiff.

As modern political and economic power have become concentrated in the centre of Cardiff and at Cardiff Bay, Caerau and Ely have become increasingly marginalised. Whereas this challenging environment has deterred archaeologists in the past, this was the very reason why the Caerau and Ely Rediscovering Heritage (CAER) project was established. However, CAER is not a straightforward community archaeology research project; it is underpinned by objectives forged during a series of initial meetings involving local residents, local school representatives, the local community development agency, local heritage institutions and a small team of academics. Importantly, these objectives are focused not upon archaeological or historical research, but, rather, on how such research might be employed to transform negative views associated with these local communities and the broader challenges that they face. From its outset, the project sought to utilise the community's rich and untapped heritage assets and local expertise to develop educational and life opportunities for its inhabitants: building confidence, challenging negative stereotypes and realising the positive potential of the process of research co-production.