Understanding contemporary significance and values can help inform engagement and outreach work. These are some of the opportunities and questions raised in incorporating social values into this area of practice.
Volunteers, site-based staff, community members, people who have studied a site, all provide potential routes to understand social values.
An understanding of social values would be helpful across multiple areas of practice: when talking to community groups, designing interpretation, assessing funding bids, working with learning resources.
Dynamic recording and interpretation processes could be kept open for changing or new values to be added (analogy with Oxford English Dictionary: not a definitive account of how language should be used but a snapshot of how language is used now and has changed over time).
Questions:
- How can contemporary social values contribute to understanding and interpretation of the past?
- How to have challenging conversations on divergent or conflicting values in a productive way?
- How, when, and to what extent are social values articulated by community members during engagements?
The case studies and the Engagement Top Tips in this Society for Museum Archaeology resource describe how practitioners have responded to some of these questions: Communicating Archaeology: Case studies in the use of, and engagement with, archaeological collections.