Hello Histarchers,
I am part of a team of four archaeologists (the others are Rachel Feit, Ken Brown, and Fred McGhee) currently writing an "historic context" document for doing African American archaeology in Texas. We are doing this at the request of our SHPO, the Texas Historical Commission (which generously provided the major funding, with additional help from several other funders).
We want to include, in this document, a number of "mini-case studies" of CRM projects which have used oral history, oral narratives, participatory engagement or ethnography as part of the process of investigating African American sites.
Even though we are all familiar with the "big/famous" examples (you know who you are!), as well as many of those which have been published in the public archaeology / African Diaspora archaeology literatures, we are sure that there are many more examples we do not know about -- that is, in the grey literature. Even though our project focuses on Texas, we don't think our case study examples need to be limited to Texas. Nor do they have to be limited to those "big/famous" exemplars.
So we would very much like to hear from you -- if you have used, or attempted to use, oral history, oral narratives, ethnography and/or participatory engagement in your CRM investigations of African American sites, could you contact us? We promise to keep the exchange, and our questions, to a minimum (we know how busy people are!) but we'd value the opportunity to learn what you have done.
We have a small budget to cover the cost of mailing reports, etc., should you be able to share those.
Please send your responses off-list -- but know that we commit to sharing what we learn with this list, once the project is finished (after January 1, 2012 ). The plan is for the document to be distributed as widely as possible, including online, and we will announce its availability to everyone when that happens.
Many thanks in advance for your help.
Carol
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Carol McDavid, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Community Archaeology Research Institute, Inc. (CARI)
Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Houston
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Rice University
1638 Branard
Houston, TX 77006
www.publicarchaeology.org
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