Archaeology to the lay public in Brazil: Three experiences

Abstract

In Latin America, there is a lack of dialogue and cooperation between archaeologists and the lay public (cf. Gnecco, 1995), though there is a growing body of evidence that this is changing, with an increasing number of archaeologists ready to engage in active community action (cf. Noelli, 1994, 1995, 1996a,b,c; Funari, 2001). For several decades, archaeologists have not been concerned with a wider audience and often a technical jargon has made it difficult for nonarchaeologists to be able to understand archaeological publications. However, several archaeologists now regard public archaeology, particularly addressing the lay public, as an essential part of their social responsibility (Mazel and Stewart, 1987: 169). Furthermore, archaeology can play a meaningful role in showing diversity, showing poverty in the past, celebrating ordinary architecture, walls that are dirty rather than clean. This way, ordinary people can recognize themselves in the archaeological discourse, using thus the past to create alternative texts for the present (Hall, 1994: 182). Public archaeology is understood in this chapter as all the public aspects of archaeology, including such topics as archaeological policies, education, politics, religion, ethnicity and archaeology, public involvement in archaeology (Ascherson, 1999). The contextual epistemological approach, since the 1980s, has opened the way for a growing interest in archaeological theory and practice for the interaction with ordinary people and communities (Funari et al., 2005). There are a variety of lay public audiences and this paper attempts to address this diversity by presenting three different experiences from Brazil (for an overview of the subject, cf. Funari, 2004). Brazil is a vast country, as big as the lower contiguous continental US and so we have chosen three different areas and a variety of lay audiences. We deal with an ethnic/political movement and the media in the case of a seventeenth-century runaway slave settlement, with squatters and school children physically close to prehistoric shell middens and with the relatives of missing people excavated by the archaeologist in clandestine cemeteries. Though each case study is unique, there are common threads that serve to aid archaeologists in dealing with lay audiences.