This issue covers a wide variety of community archaeology and community heritage engagements. These range from the successes and, notably, failures of activist ventures, to the application of crowd-funding to community archaeology, to heritage-based therapy with older people, to the centennial commemoration of one of the largest heritage services in the world.
In our first article, Sandra Scham reflects frankly on her experiences with a project that aimed to give a louder voice to the marginalized Palestinian cultural heritage within and around Canada Park in Israel. With refreshing candor, she focuses on aspects of the work that failed to achieve project goals. While Scham's account benefits from hindsight and years to contemplate what happened, the paper from Chiara Bonacchi, Andrew Bevan, Daniel Pett, and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert covers emerging research from the past 12 months. They analyse crowd-funding as a means of supporting community archaeology, through the preliminary steps made through the larger crowd-sourcing website of MicroPasts. This project, run through University College London's Institute of Archaeology and the British Museum, has sought to support grass-root collaborations between professional/academic institutions and community groups using non-intrusive archaeological research methods. Their attempts to crowd-fund a handful of projects, although less fruitful than originally hoped, provide important insights into the role such funding models may have in the future.
This issue also includes the start of our first ever Special Series, entitled ‘To Preserve and Protect: The National Park Service and Community Archaeology'. This series marks the upcoming centenary (in 2016) of the National Parks Service (NPS) of the USA. Unlike a Special Issue that runs for one issue only, our new Special Series will feature a sequence of grouped papers over several different issues. This particular Series will appear in the third issue of the next three volumes, including this one. Guest Editor Teresa Moyer first provides a historical overview of the NPS, after which two Special Series papers explore public and community archaeology work in specific areas of the service. Meredith Hardy marks the 50th anniversary of the Southeast Archaeological Center (SEAC) in Tallahassee, Florida, and tracks its development within the NPS and the central role of public engagement at SEAC. Douglas C. Wilson focuses on the NPS Public Archaeology Program at Fort Vancouver Village, part of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington State. These papers offer a tantalizing introduction to this Special Series.
In our regular Reflections article, UK-based freelance tutor-trainer Julie Smalley gives a personal and good-humoured account of using cultural heritage to enhance the wellbeing of older people, particularly those residing in so-called ‘retirement villages'. She notes how her own experiences as a heritage volunteer, and her skill with TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), equipped her to incorporate heritage into her work with the sometimes under-served retired community.
Finally, we offer both conference and book reviews. Harking back to the Special Series NPS theme, Natasha Ferguson of National Museums Scotland reviews the Fields of Conflict conference held in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2014. This conference had support from the NPS-run American Battlefield Protection Program, and featured much input from NPS archaeologists, as well as much discussion around community involvement. Athena Hadji from the University of the Aegean provides a thoughtful review of Robert Fletcher's 2014 book Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism.