Cultural heritage-related activities may break down barriers to public participation and – within the contexts of museums, historic landscapes and parks, and others – may positively impact individual and community wellbeing. Wellbeing is a construct with multiple meanings and usually paired with health, quality of life and material living conditions. It is both an individual and a collective state: individual wellbeing is defined as a “good mental state, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that people make of their lives and the affective reactions of people to their experiences”. Community wellbeing is primarily “about strong networks of relationships and support between people in a community” and enables to “improve things in, and influence decisions about, their community”. In archaeology the link with wellbeing is still underexplored. LOGGIA will explore this connection focusing on community wellbeing. This approach will be timely since archaeology is experiencing growing pressure to demonstrate its value in contemporary society. In recent decades, public archaeology has identified opportunities of interaction with laypeople such as community archaeology projects. Community archaeology is defined as “archaeology made by the people”. Fostering a bottom-up approach to archaeological research, it facilitates the involvement of local people in the investigation and interpretation of the past. It covers topics such as public participation, sociocultural and economic values, issues of contested heritage, equal access and social justice, which have been examined by both the proposed supervisor and me from different perspectives but with similar approaches. Although the evaluation of wellbeing is not native to community archaeology projects, several studies developed in the United Kingdom have investigated the impact of community archaeology programs on participants’ individual wellbeing. They reported positive outcomes including socialisation, happiness, self-esteem, reduction in stigma and motivation to seek help. By involving specific groups (e.g. mental health service users and veterans) in archaeology-related activities (e.g. excavation and landscape journeying), ground-breaking projects such as Human Henge, Waterloo Uncovered, Operation Nightingale have defined archaeology as a successful means of non-medical intervention, benefiting individual wellbeing and facilitating recovery and rehabilitation.
LOGGIA goes beyond the state of the art by:
• Investigating the connections between community wellbeing and archaeology and developing new theoretical and evaluation frameworks based on specific indicators relevant for archaeology.
• From the perspective of recovery, involving specific vulnerable groups among the persons with disabilities with their families and carers, and encouraging local stakeholders to support the action.
• Focussing on the Mediterranean, where few projects have previously been carried out , and those that have been performed were disconnected from community archaeology programs.
• Proposing tailored activities with a focus on the historic landscape through case study research. Activities such as creative writing, photography, art workshops, and others will allow the target users to provide their vision of the archaeological past. Thus, LOGGIA will reconnect with the otherness’ approach employed in disability studies.
• Proposing tailored activities based on a digital environment. Some archaeology-based programs have explored how to involve the public through popular videogames as Minecraft, but no attempts have been made to use digital archaeology to enhance accessibility, interaction, and fun for persons with disabilities.
LOGGIA addresses specific research objectives:
RO1: To outline a theoretical and evaluation framework linking community wellbeing and archaeology, with a specific focus on the identification of community wellbeing indicators that can cover the stakeholders’ involvement in archaeology.
RO2: To use case study research to assess the inclusion of persons with disabilities in community archaeology projects in the Mediterranean, and to understand the impact on community wellbeing.
RO3: To assess the extent to which the interaction with a digital environment based on the case studies can contribute to the inclusion of persons with disabilities and their wellbeing.
