Archaeological Ethnography, Heritage Management, and Community Archaeology: A Pragmatic Approach from Crete

This article examines the introduction of archaeological ethnography as an approach to establish positioned research and bring context-specific and reflexive considerations into community archaeology projects. It considers recent cri-tiques of heritage management in archaeology and the role of archaeologists as experts in it, contending that smaller and less prominent sites exist in different contexts and pose different problems than large-scale projects usually addressed in the literature. We describe how the ‘Three Peak Sanctuaries of Central Crete’ project, investigating prehistoric Minoan ritual sites, involves communities and stakeholders and what demands the latter pose on experts in the field. Archae-ological work is always already implicated in local development projects which create and reproduce power hierarchies. It is therefore important that archaeol-ogists maintain their critical distance from official heritage discourses, as they are materialized in development programmes, while at the same time engaging with local expectations and power struggles; they also have to critically address and position their own assumptions. We use examples from our community archae-ology project to propose that these goals can be reached through archaeological ethnographic fieldwork that should precede any archaeological project to inform its methodological decisions, engage stakeholders, and collaboratively shape heritage management strategies

Researching Biographies of Archaeological Sites: The Case of Sikyon

The local meanings of antiquities that exist in parallel with official archaeological ones have become increasingly obvious through ethnographic research. Whether such ethnographies constitute anthropological or archaeological practices raises ontological questions about disciplinary identities. The ethnographic research I conducted as an anthropologist in Vasiliko/Sikyon, Greece, at the time when an archaeological research was taking place, investigated the multiple local meanings of the antiquities as perceptions of the past-present-future conditions of people's lives. By focusing on the life conditions of the present and the recent past, the research shows how the contemporary conditions of people's lives in the village attribute multiple lives and multivocality to antiquities. The research shows that the agricultural conditions of the present, the development of archaeological tourism, the predominance of antiquities as national symbols, the diverse relationships between the Archaeological Services and the local people, the varying individual interests in the antiquities, the myths and the stories about ancient treasures, the looting of antiquities, but also the archaeological practices themselves, all provide competing local meanings and contribute to the construction of a locality that values antiquities, albeit in ways different from the official ones. Even the actual focus of the ethnographic research and the conditions under which it was conducted are indicative of the complex interrelationships between local and official significations of antiquities