January’s #HeritageChat was led by CIfA’s Voluntary and Community Archaeology Group. It explored how infrastructure projects (e.g. HS2, A14, Tideway) can be used to connect communities with place.
Twitter-ers discussed when (at what stage in a project) there’s greatest potential for engaging communities, with most agreeing that it’s important that local people are involved from the very beginning. The chat then explored how communities can take a leading role in interpretation and be involved in post-excavation research. Discussions also focused upon the problems that ‘client confidentiality’ poses to community engagement and how we can ensure that infrastructure projects are sensitive to the needs of local communities. It was a great chat and you can catch up on the summary here.
The topic came from the Heritage 2020 Discovery, Identification and Understanding working group (find out more here). We’re always looking for topics that the sector would like to discuss via the medium of Twitter. The next #HeritageChat will take place on 21 February 2019.
If you have a suggestion, or if you would like to help run a chat, please let us know by emailing Caroline Peach at heritage2020@theheritagealliance.org.uk.