Abstract

Community or public archaeology has been the focus of professional effort and academic examination for decades. Most of this has a goal of creating public value, and takes the form of ‘outreach’ from a presumed disciplinary core, potentially downplaying conflict within the discipline. It is also a vehicle for engagement, and more recently, a means for drawing descendant communities into archaeological fieldwork (Blair 2004). While recently many projects have extended public understanding beyond fieldwork, lay interest in archaeology is often framed through discovery and adventure, making careful discussion of ‘whose past’ difficult (Pyburn 2011). As we broaden our ideas about ‘public’, consider indigenous ways of knowing, and integrate new digital tools and practice, public ‘outreach' might be transformed into a locus of reconciliation, and re-conceptualized as a place for exploring and evaluating the very epistemologies that underpin ‘conventional’ archaeologies, opening new possibilities for engagement and involvement in the discipline. In this paper, we describe a developing podcasting project that explores these underpinnings by engaging and building capacity within communities (publics, both indigenous and non-indigenous) through concepts like two-eyed seeing, to create intellectual space for examining archaeology on indigenous terms, for training young archaeologists and potentially, for transforming the discipline.