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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Forum: Is Public Archaeology a menace?

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So sang my friend, colleague, and then-office manager Ron Melander in about 1971, in a song he wrote about me. I quote it here to help establish my bona fides in "public archaeology." I began my career as an amateur archaeologist (some would use less complimentary terms) and am now engaged in ending it similarly. In its course I've worked as an academic and applied professional archaeologist, often -if not always- with a strong tilt toward public involvement, participated in the development of "cultural resource management" (CRM)1, worked and published in that milieu, and incidentally was involved in U.S. archaeological politics at the time when C.R. McGimsey more or less invented the term "public archaeology" (McGimsey 1972). I had qualms about the term then, and I have qualms about it now. I want to explain why.