ABSTRACT
After more than five years of engagement through our public archaeology project, the residents of the village of Gonies have a great sense of pride in their various aspects of heritage and, even more importantly, they view themselves as its guardians. They also recognize that their heritage is a resource that makes their village unique and can promote its cultural and, in the longer term, economic flourishing. Drawing entirely on their own resources, the community have undertaken some excellent grassroots initiatives to protect and promote various aspects of their heritage, and in doing so have partly achieved important community goals of bringing new life to the village and of also making their village better known. Heritage has become a useful part of the lives of the members of the community, something they want to protect, preserve and enhance, and a resource that they can dynamically use to further their own goals and promote their own well-being. We believe that these outcomes demonstrate that our project succeeded in its goal of empowering the members of the local community in terms of distributing power more equitably to them in relation to the local heritage, and it is for this reason that we believe that the approach that is described in this volume can aptly be called ‘community empowerment’ public archaeology.
