Survey on Historical Archaeology’s Engagement With The Public – Please Respond

All,

I hope that everyone has recovered from St. Charles and are starting to think about summer excavations. Before summer gets here (which this year is a long ways away out here in N. Idaho!) I want to follow up on something  I discussed in last year's newsletter and ask you to look back on what you did in 2018. 

Below is a link to a brief survey. The intent is to try to gather some data on historical archaeology’s engagement with the public. My sense is that most of us collect and report public outreach data for our individual projects but as a discipline we have no sense of what our collective reach is.  As I have said before, we need to marshal information to become effective advocates for or discipline and having a sense of our connection to communities is tremendously important.  We know that we have about 1.1 million page views on the website and 7000 facebook members but we have no idea how many people visit or participate in historical archaeology excavations.

Gathering this information is extremely important information for any archaeological advocacy. 

To address this we have created a short survey of our membership to gather information on the scale of our reach into communities.  

Please take 5 minutes to fill out the survey – and here’s the information you might want to have available:

How many public archaeology events did your group host?(excavations, open houses, etc)
How many people attended the events or visited your projects?
What are the number of social media followers for your group or organization?
# of media stories on your events
# of volunteers participating in your projects
# of volunteer hours contributed

Here is the survey link:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HXMRBH3

Again, thank you for taking a few minutes to take this survey, if you have any questions please feel free to email me.

Mark Warner

President, Society for Historical Archaeology
president@sha.org
mwarner@uidaho.edu