The place to be: Community archaeology as a tool for cultural integration

ABSTRACT

This article presents two case studies in which public archaeology was used to attempt to shift local perspectives on migration and migrants. The two archaeology projects, which took place in the United States and Sweden, emphasized participants’ connections to places and shared experiences in the past rather than to ethnic groups in an attempt to combat the use of heritage and archaeological interpretations as a mechanism for xenophobia. Here we discuss our experiences with this form of social justice-oriented public archaeology, including identifying methods, observations, and approaches that can be adapted for other contexts, and explore the possibilities for archaeology to be used to address pressing and widespread concerns in society today.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• nationalism
• public archaeology
• integration
• critical heritage

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Drs. Paul Shackel and Mark Leone as well as the 2014, 2015, and 2016 participants of the University of Maryland Pennsylvania Archaeology Field School and Summer Mentoring Program. We also want to thank the participants of the project Vems historia? in 2013. Additional thanks to Michael Roller, Håkan Karlsson, and Anita Synnestvedt for their constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript. We are indebted to our anonymous reviewers for their constructive and useful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

V. Camille Westmont is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on the roles of the built environment and material culture in workers’ identity formation in industrial contexts. She is a former co-director of the Anthracite Heritage Project. She holds Masters in Applied Anthropology and Masters in Historic Preservation degrees, both from the University of Maryland. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Society for Architectural Historians, Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish Research Council), and the University of Maryland’s College of Behavior and Social Sciences.

Andreas Antelid holds an MA in Archaeology and is a Swedish licensed teacher with experience from several projects with archaeological methods in a school environment. His academic work has specialized in discussing post-colonial theories applied to historical and archaeological works as well as analysing nationalistic tendencies in early twentieth century archaeology in Sweden. In 2013, he managed the archaeological project Vems historia? in Sweden.

ORCID

V. Camille Westmont http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4229-6340

Andreas Antelid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2270-9892

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Cultural Affairs Committee of Region Västra Götaland; and the US National Science Foundation under Grant DGE 1322106.