First I will offer a view of public archaeology which differs from Dawdy's perspective. Then I will respond briefly to one of her specific questions. Finally, I will comment on her suggestion for a futurist archaeology.

For the last decade and a half, and certainly since the turn of the millennium, people who practise public archaeology (worldwide) have been producing theoretically informed scholarship about what we actually do with our publics. Perhaps more importantly, they have been conducting critical examinations of what this work with our publics does – in terms of both archaeology as a discipline and social life more generally. There have been many publications, as well as countless conference sessions, most of which have featured critical, reflexive – and, yes, honest – assessments from people who call themselves (variously) public archaeologists, CRM archaeologists, archaeological heritage managers, archaeological ethnographers, cultural resource managers, archaeology educators, museum curators, journalists, website designers, community archaeologists and any number of other things. In short, the ‘public archaeology’ that Dawdy seems so sure of is not the public archaeology that I know.

So perhaps some discussion of definitions and scope would be helpful, although I should make it clear (as one who has practised public archaeology since the early 1990s) that I have no wish to advocate any particular definition as either fixed or inflexible (Jeppson and McDavid 2000; McDavid 2005). Our definitions (and, for that matter, our solutions to problems of the sort Dawdy raises) should always be historically situated, contingent and fluid (McDavid 2000; 2002). Even so, it is clear that public archaeology now extends far beyond its original agenda to promote the stewardship ethic (the history of which was well described by Friedman 2000). Public archaeology is no longer accurately defined as ‘just’ education or ‘just’ outreach, or for that matter ‘just’ heritage. Key issues (quoting from the masthead of the nine-year-old international journal Public archaeology) include (among other things):

Like any discipline, there is good work and bad, and I would admit that some of the writing about public archaeology has been on occasion a bit over-celebratory. Uncritical and glowing reports about working with kids at the site, for example, are indeed part of the literature (although I would say that this type of account was published more often in the 1990s than in recent years). I would also agree with Dawdy (see McDavid 2004a; 2004b; 2010) that doing public archaeology only to promote stewardship (that is, to promote itself) could be self-serving. However, I do not paint all public archaeology with the same wide and dismissive brush as she does. In addition, it is important to realize that promoting stewardship, serving public (or futurist) agendas and, even, ‘rescuing’ archaeology from ‘the colonial and imperial agendas that once needed it’ are not mutually exclusive programmes. Public archaeologists can and should do all of these things, and, most importantly, they do do them. So my own perhaps cranky objection to Dawdy's rather outdated view of public archaeology is very likely because we have differently informed views about what most public archaeology actually is. A definition that I have found useful (for the time being!) is that public archaeology can now be seen as any endeavour in which archaeologists interact with the public, and any research (practical, analytical or theoretical) that examines or analyses the public dimensions of doing archaeology.

It is interesting to note that using this definition, the current public archaeology literature now includes Dawdy's paper, because in it she is examining the public dimensions of archaeology and advocating certain types of change. Her recent paper in Historical archaeology (Dawdy 2008) could also be defined as a public archaeology paper – and a useful one. The part of the literature that she does not consider in her critique, however, includes hundreds of examples where archaeological and public archaeological work is indeed useful, and for very good reasons – reasons that our publics themselves (including our grassroots and local publics) have attested to. An extremely small sampling (other than the few she cites) includes:Footnote ¹

• • Using archaeology's time depth to combat environmental discrimination, to convince powerful state-wide agencies to give a low-income rural community in Alabama a voice in planning for pollution and flood control in their community (Derry 2003).

• • Working with the families of missing people in South America as part of larger identification and reburial projects (Funari and Zarankin 2006; Zarankin and Funari 2008).

• • Assisting descendant communities with their agendas to reclaim community history despite ‘urban renewal’ and insensitive gentrification (McDavid, Bruner and Marcom 2008; Mullins 2003; 2006).

• • Using archaeology to support and inform community efforts to counter racist narratives and dismantle white privilege (Levin 2009; LaRoche 2009; Matthews 2008; McDavid 2007; Tennant 2007; Uunila 2003; Zimmerman and Echo-Hawk 2006).

• • Using archaeology to create new conversations about class equity in America (Gadsby and Chidester 2007; Saitta 2007).

• • Developing active roles for archaeology and heritage in ‘overcoming structural violence and bridging conflicts’ in the occupied Palestinian territories (World Archaeology Congress 2009) and in a changing South Africa (Jeppson 1997).

• • Using the archaeology of homelessness to persuade local faith-based and governmental service agencies to develop more culturally sensitive programmes and centres for their homeless citizens (Zimmerman and Welch 2008).

• • Helping revitalize communities through heritage tourism developments, and working with governments and NGOs to create opportunities for local empowerment in heritage tourism projects (Leader-Elliot 2001; Silverman 2002; Silverman and Ruggles 2007).

In this last arena, as Dawdy points out, in the past some archaeologists may have been ‘squeamish’ about collaborating with communities in tourism efforts; and some have left the ‘economic development of tourism and monuments to others’ (p. 140). I would suggest that for the most part this characterization, too, is outdated, and that many archaeologists are indeed contributing their ‘anthropological sensitivity’ to helping ‘local communities have a voice in these developments’ and, as well, are helping them to ‘improve the conditions of their lives in ways that are important to them’ (p. 140).

It is clear that the agendas for most of this work are not set only by archaeologists, as Dawdy alleges. When this work is also characterized as community archaeology (which is not always the case; community archaeology is but one form of public archaeology) it is usually not directed towards scholarly agendas as much as it is focused on creating public spaces for community voices, who can and do make of that space whatever they like or need.

This leads to my response to one particular comment that Dawdy makes, when she suggests that public archaeologists should (presumably always) ‘fill out a protocol for an Institutional Review Board’ (p. 138).Footnote ² Again, it strikes me that her sense of what public archaeology ‘is’ varies from mine. First, it would be arrogant (and intellectually elitist) of me to ask the communities I work with to obtain Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval before telling me what they think about what I do – and it is precisely that sort of input that comprises much of my public archaeology practice. As we share ideas and interests common to us as citizens (as she puts it, discussing how archaeology can help in ‘creating recognition for the contributions of African Americans or encouraging a more democratic society’; p. 138) should I attempt to control the ‘powers and sentiments’ that are ‘unleashed’ as I share the results of my archaeological research? This implies that I should hide behind the shelter of objectivity about my work in order to share it, or that I need to maintain some sort of gatekeeper role in how other humans understand and use my data. If archaeologists and our ethical clients (Perry, Howson and Bianco 2006, 445) are sitting at the same table in mutually empowered roles (which is what most of us who do public archaeology these days shoot for), who am I to ask these clients to sign a form that says it is OK for them to tell me what they think?

Second, there are matters of both logistics and appropriateness. Consider, for example, the major public archaeology project undertaken at the President's House site in Philadelphia in the summer of 2008 (LaRoche 2007; Levin 2009; Jeppson and Roberts 2009). Over 300,000 people visited the site while excavations were taking place, and archaeologists spent literally hundreds of hours talking to visitors about the project. Should site visitors have been required to sign informed consent forms before having conversations with archaeologists doing work that public taxes were paying for? Should archaeologists have sought IRB review before speaking to crowds of thousands at the mayor's request at Independence Hall on 4 July? Interactions like these (at difference scales, obviously) happen every day at archaeological sites across the country. Doing good public archaeology means not only seeking this type of communication, it means examining, analysing and understanding it: it is the dialogic space where archaeology becomes most meaningful.

So, is it fair for Dawdy to suggest that archaeologists obtain IRB review to do public archaeology work? The answer is sometimes – if and when it is appropriate and ethical to do so. It is not always appropriate and it is not always ethical. We need to remember that IRB approval is not the same as informed consent – and informed consent is indeed an issue that most of us take very seriously. One needs substantial community interaction before even knowing what form proper informed consent should take.

In the contexts in which I work, I have no wish to be ‘apologetically inclusive’ (her words; p. 139) – I just want to be inclusive, and Dawdy is correct that oftentimes it is the archaeologist who invites publics ‘in’, not the other way around. However, even when archaeologists are the ones who come up with projects and invite communities to participate, we do not necessarily dictate the process, the result or even the research agendas. Our roles in any given context can, and should, vary, by need and by community desire. It is our responsibility to ask all of those we work with – as collaborators, as ethical clients and as fellow citizens – what sorts of solutions they need. Just because people may not think first about archaeology when considering solutions, this does not mean that archaeology cannot offer them.

I suspect Dawdy would agree with me that this process should always be a critical one, and to that end I have found useful analytical frameworks for community-based public archaeology in the community-organizing, or participatory action research (PAR) literature. Here Randy Stoecker has described three different roles for academics as they work in community projects: the ‘the initiator’, ‘the consultant’, and ‘the collaborator’ (Stoecker 1997). Although useful public archaeology can take place in all of these scenarios (McDavid 2009a; McGhee and McDavid 2009), one important insight that Stoecker offers is to question the notion that participatory projects are ‘research’. In most cases, the archaeological research is only one piece of a larger enterprise, and the question of how, and whether, to obtain informed consent has to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Finally, with regard to Dawdy's last question, ‘can archaeology save the world?’, and to her potentially useful suggestions about a futurist archaeology, first I should point out that a session entitled precisely that (‘Can Archaeology Save the World?’) was chaired by Jay Stottman at the Society for Historical Archaeology annual meeting in 2004, and a volume springing from that session is in the final stages of publication (Stottman 2010). Did we come up with monumental solutions then? No, of course not. But in that session, and many similar venues, we were not ‘nervous’, we were ‘honest’, we did attempt to apply our work to ‘pressing contemporary problems’, we did not ‘delude ourselves’ that our work was ‘unproblematically uplifting’, we did not overstate how ‘truly helpful’ (p. 141) our work is, and we did not ‘hide from the fact’ that constituency-building is part of what we do. As Paul Mullins put it in his discussant comments from that session (Mullins 2004b), ‘consequential transformation might arise from apparently mundane interpretations and moments’. He also noted,

In this view, ‘changing the world’ can take place in small steps, and small transformations. Even so, I applaud grand goals, and would elaborate on one before closing. This is the question of war – it is surely a big reason for the current atmosphere of doom which Dawdy describes as she begins her piece. How can what we know about warfare be useful to those who would wage it, unless there are mechanisms for them to learn what we know? An example of at least one archaeologist who is attempting to influence this sort of decision-making is John Carman, a senior lecturer in heritage valuation at the University of Birmingham, UK. Carman has been asked to provide deep-time insights (informed by his archaeological research in conflict archaeology) at an upcoming conference being sponsored by Birmingham's well-respected Security Studies group (Carman, personal communication). The conference, to include participation from the Birmingham University Centre for War Studies, is likely to reach those who do military planning in the UK. This is but one effort, and the point of mentioning it here is that John himself regards his ‘Bloody Meadows’ archaeological project as, in part, a form of public archaeology which links a pacifist archaeological perspective on warfare to contemporary concerns (Carman and Carman 2007). There are similar efforts from others who are working with the military on sites of past conflict, as was evident in the programme for WAC-6, held in Dublin last year (see http://www.ucd.ie/wac-6/). The place of archaeology in any of these emerging discussions may be small, but they represent a good start.

So I would ask Dawdy the same thing I asked in my recent review (McDavid 2009b) of Jeremy Sabloff's very good book Archaeology matters. Action archaeology in the modern world (Sabloff 2008): how can we operationalize a truly useful ‘futurist archaeology’? Potential archaeological contributions to big-issue solutions were explored in great detail in Sabloff's book, and also in Barbara Little's recent books The public benefits of archaeology (2002) and Historical archaeology. Why the past matters (2007). One problem is, of course, that there is little support within our discipline for spending the necessary time to influence interests outside it. As Sabloff puts it, ‘academic institutions generally do not reward the kinds of outreach that action archaeology entails as strongly as they could and should . . . [and] some scholars still regard any kind of applied work with a degree of leeriness, seeing it as somehow being less worthy than academic work’ (Sabloff 2008, 109).

Aggravating this reality is another – that most contemporary archaeology takes place in commercial (often referred to as CRM) settings, where one might argue that it could work against the archaeological income stream to be vocal in either politics or policy. Local politics, of course, vary in this regard – I work in Texas, where property rights pretty much trump everything else, and woe betide any contract archaeologist who wants to be active in local policy planning if it thwarts developer-friendly local governments. It is here – in a critique of its capitalist realities – where I suspect my own comments about CRM (as one form of public archaeology) might intersect with Dawdy's, were we to explore it. I would agree with her that we need to think past ‘preserving our careers’ and instead find more ways to use ‘archaeology to address specific social and environmental problems of the present day’ (p. 140).

So to close my comments here, I hope that those of us who would support the type of public archaeology that Dawdy calls for, calling it futurist archaeology or whatever, will, first, become fully informed about the scope of work that has already taken place: understanding the broader context will enable the futurist to develop public archaeologies that are more productive and, yes, more useful. I hope we will then find ways to support and encourage our archaeological colleagues to take seats at the tables where policies are planned, ordinances and laws drafted, regulations implemented, and solutions found. By participating in these arenas, archaeologists would indeed be useful, and would be doing better public archaeology besides.