NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS: A VALUE-ORIENTED APPROACH FOR THE PARTICIPATION OF VOLUNTEERS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 27/12/2020

Over the last years, the spreading of outreach initiatives in Italian public archaeology has fostered the participation of volunteers. Defined in the Collins dictionary as “people who does work without being paid for it, because they want to do it”, their participation in archaeology is still lacking a proper regulation. As a result, the legitimacy of their involvement in archaeological activities has been and keeps on being a hot topic of debate in many cases: for instance, currently volunteers cannot take part in archaeological excavations. Since the situation is very complex and can not be solved with a yes-no question, what logic should we adopt for regulating their participation and addressing their impact? Trying to go one step further, this paper wants to question the volunteers’ participation and their impact from a value-oriented approach, considering their role in archaeological outreach. Data from quantitative and qualitative analysis – collected in some selected case-studies currently under investigation in my PhD research - will help to engage with three main considerations: the volunteers are not a single and monolithic body, they refer to different kinds of secondary stakeholders (or outsiders, those who have an interest in cultural heritage but little or no say in the decision-making process); they have different expectations and do not ask for the same level of participation; these levels are related to different sociocultural and economic values.


Author(s): Ripanti, Francesco (University of Pisa)