Participating in the Past: Good Practice in Encouraging Participation

4 Good Practice in Encouraging Participation

This section describes the broad range of participation opportunities reported by organisational respondents together with some views from participants. The account is couched largely in general terms since naming some, but not all, providers of participatory opportunities would provoke claims of partiality. In a few instances organisations are named because of their unique positions in British archaeology.

Opportunity has been taken to include some additional areas of participation known to the working party but not specifically noted by respondents, since it is anticipated that this section might be utilised by both individuals and organisations seeking new areas to investigate. Although a simple categorisation of ‘participation’ into themes has been used below, in reality these are highly interdependent.

The overall impression gained from the responses was that whilst traditional activities stand people in good stead, a number of innovative approaches to public participation are continuously being developed. Examples include provision of roadshows for schools and induction courses for teachers, links with non-archaeological community events such as arts events, provision of field training for the public by local societies, adopt-a-monument schemes, SMR open days and public access developments, and national participatory schemes such as Shorewatch.

Interestingly, although many organisations give considerable attention to establishing and maintaining a web-presence, this aspect of participation was rarely cited in the responses, perhaps because web sites were seen by survey participants as a source of reference rather than participation.