Applied Heritage
At the start of this book I offered examples of how archaeological knowledge and skills are being applied in ways that are socially useful and relevant to contemporary society. Building on what Holtorf and Fairclough (2013) term the ‘New Heritage’, I want to go further to suggest that some participatory cultural heritage work might explicitly set out to function as a therapeutic social intervention with marginalized communities. I will call this Applied Heritage. Before I outline what Applied Heritage could conceivably comprise I want to look more closely at the findings and results of the Homeless Heritage project. In the first part of this chapter I unpack how material culture relates to and stimulates memories which shape perceptions and may be useful in aiding the reconstruction of identities following experiences of marginalization or trauma. Following this, I will look at the negative impact that memories can have for populations who feel ‘out of place’ in the physical environments in which they are forced to exist. I examine several ways in which a cultural heritage lens can be shown to have been useful in addressing some of the challenges first experienced in engaging people on the Homeless Heritage project. The second part of this chapter looks at how an archaeological approach to contemporary homelessness was useful in identifying how historic attitudes to homelessness, which were enshrined in policies intended to deal with vagrancy, continue to haunt current homeless legislation. Archaeologist Michael Shanks has observed that ‘a key component of archaeological thinking is . . . personal standpoint, in a context of sometimes considerable state investment in heritage and stewardship of the remains of the past’. The Homeless Heritage project sought to document multiple ‘personal standpoints’ which often directly contravened those memories of the past preferred and pushed by the state. As we saw in the brief history of the development of homelessness as a social status offered in Chapter 4, states have increasingly conflated homelessness and associated social deprivation with criminality.