Private property, public archaeology: resident communities as stakeholders in American archaeology

Abstract

In the United States, archaeological sites on private lands have few legal protections, and are thus at risk of damage or destruction. To alleviate these risks, archaeologists must engage thoughtfully with private property owners and develop strategies to promote site stewardship. In this article, I identify the resident community – those people who live on archaeological sites, regardless of their ancestral ties to those sites – as an important stakeholder in archaeology. Based on recent fieldwork experiences on a privately owned site in the south-eastern US, I discuss the unique challenges of engaging a resident community in archaeological research, and the potential of such engagement for fostering archaeological stewardship. Specifically, I use theories of place attachment derived from environmental psychology to explore how resident communities may be encouraged to empathize with and protect the archaeological records of past people.

Keywords:

• Private property
• resident community
• place attachment
• stewardship

Notes

1 In fact, there are many cases in the US in which private landowners know about and are ardent protectors of their properties’ archaeological resources (for a recent example, see Gallivan and Danielle 2007). This article aims to explore strategies for encouraging stewardship among private property owners who are initially less aware of or less invested in local archaeology.

2 With regard to human remains, local residents were entirely receptive to the idea that graves should remain undisturbed. In fact, one elderly resident expressed pride in the fact that her ancestor – one of the property’s pre-neighbourhood settlers – would not allow representatives from Richmond’s Valentine Museum to mine a then-extant mound for artefacts, demanding instead that they ‘Let the dead rest’ (Valentine n.d. A:133, cited in Keel 1976, 74).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice P. Wright

Alice P. Wright, PhD, University of Michigan, is an Assistant Professor of anthropological archaeology at Appalachian State University. She specializes in the archaeology of the southern Appalachian Mountains and the role of interregional interaction in the Native eastern North America.