Abstract
In this discussion, I treat community archaeology as a subset of public archaeology and consider the issues of community archaeology as a preamble to discussion of wider issues engendered by archaeologists attempting to orient their efforts to a public sphere. The most undertheorized aspect of community archaeology is the idea of community itself. Although archaeologists often discuss the competing concerns of various interest groups, such groups are either regarded as subgroups of a single community or as competing communities, but the term community is defined with a description of a particular set of people or simply left undefined. Here, I problematize the concept of community on three fronts: (1) any individual belongs to multiple communities; (2) community archaeology frequently reifies imaginary communities, which have been created by the archaeologists; and (3) community archaeology needs to consider not only descendant and local communities, but also those communities with political and economic power.
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Acknowledgments
The useful parts of this chapter (if there are any) are a result of long and interesting conversations I had with Akira Matsuda over the course of the 6 months I was visiting at UCL in 2008 and exchanges that took place over the Internet as I was writing. The rest of the chapter is my fault.
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Pyburn, K.A. (2011). Engaged Archaeology: Whose Community? Which Public?. In: Okamura, K., Matsuda, A. (eds) New Perspectives in Global Public Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0341-8_3
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