Archaeological Heritage and Public Responsibility: Can We Create Citizen Archaeologists?

The mid-southern Peninsula of India’s Neolithic and Megalithic (Iron Age) settlements were, for a long time, not affected by developmental activities and archaeologists presumed these sites to remain safe. However, over the last couple of decades, the mining boom began to threaten the sites’ survival for posterity and faced danger of extinction from the landscape. This situation necessitated organised public outreach archaeology as well as salvaging material culture evidence with systematic field documentation and collection of antiquities. It was aimed to convince the local authorities to help establish a local museum to facilitate the storage of antiquities, prepare a catalogue of antiquities and organise local archaeology workshops for schoolteachers, and middle and high school level students. Over a period of ten years, several goals were achieved, and the presentation narrates the various stages of this development. It relates the means by which antiquities for the museum are procured and the museum’s development. It also delves into the issue of how local communities and local stakeholders contributed to the museum’s development and asks about the future of such an endeavour.