Hard road to travel: lessons learnt from practicing community archaeology

Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage has developed community archaeology projects with marginalized communities, and within areas where archaeology is often disregarded, socially, economically, and politically. These projects use approaches based on the co-production of historical and archaeological knowledge, and have ethical implications for academics and participants; projects actively engaging the public in archaeology often do so by linking modern day communities to historical communities, and in this process uncover uncomfortable truths and painful pasts. To explore the issues raised by this work, this paper self and collaboratively reflects on experiences from two contrasting community archaeology projects in the UK and Nigeria. This discusses lessons learnt from these ‘socially engaged’ community archaeology projects, including contentious and unanticipated aspects that arose in the field, and such issues as dealing with conflicting values, ensuring long-term sustainability, supporting duty of care, and understanding psychological and emotional risk.