Crowd-sourced Archaeological Research: The MicroPasts Project

Abstract

This paper offers a brief introduction to MicroPasts, a web-enabled crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding project whose overall goal is to promote the collection and use of high quality research data via institutional and community collaborations, both on- and off-line. In addition to introducing this ini- tiative, the discussion below is a reflection of its lead author’s core contribution to the project and will dwell in more detail on one particular aspect of MicroPasts: its relevance to research and practice in public archaeol- ogy, cultural policy and heritage studies. In