Front Yard, Back Yard: Lessons in Neighborhood Archaeology in an Urban Environment

Doing archaeology right where people live brings immediacy to the processes of site interpretation and heritage-making not usually present in more remote projects. When people can peer down into their buried history or the history of their neighborhood as they move about in the course of their daily lives, public archaeology suddenly becomes very personal. Memory and imagination blend together to create connections to a past that are both highly idiosyncratic and of the political present. Two projects in Tampa aimed at unearthing the forgotten history of the recent past are examined as case studies.