Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
Such a scary title right? Well, boy oh boy do I have an adventure for you today.
So, I was at a really bougie historic preservation conference because my bosses were presenting. The last panel I went to was supposed to cover the kinds of issues with Cultural Resource Management (CRM) the state was coming across.
They ended up talking about how all of this would kind of be fixed if we had more funding from the state and more robust laws surrounding archaeological materials.
But this was a room of basically only archaeologists, and mostly professional archaeologists over the age of 35. We were in such an echo chamber. I was the only “young” student there.
SO. I start getting pissed because the same people just kept practically saying “but HOW do we fix our funding problem, we have such AWESOME sites.” “oh, the public is definitely a vital piece to archaeology” but no one was saying the (what I thought was) obvious.
TL;DR If archaeologists want to fix their problems, they need to DO something about it instead of sitting in an echochamber. WE need to make sure the public knows what we do, and more importantly, WHY it matters. We need to make sure the information we disseminate is not just for ourselves in the present, but for the public, for EVERYONE, and for everyone in perpetuity.