Between 2023 and 2024, the Anchor Church Heritage Project brought together a multidisciplinary team to conserve and revitalise Anchor Church, a medieval hermitage, Victorian retreat, and modern cultural landmark. Fostering collaboration between specialists and non-specialists, this project provided diverse community-engagement opportunities for undergraduate students from the University of Leicester as volunteer heritage researchers. Through their research, blog writing, and the development of interpretive signage, the students were able to uncover the story of Anchor Church and create resources to engage a broader public audience. The project ultimately fulfilled its aims to raise local awareness of Anchor Church, reduce vandalism, encourage public involvement in conservation efforts, and provide “real world” experience for students beyond the classroom. This case study in collaboration highlights the mutual benefits of projects which unite student volunteers and heritage professionals with coinciding goals of improved conservation, enhanced cultural value, and outreach. Demonstrating how community engagement, education, and interpretation can address and reduce instances of vandalism at rural heritage sites, the paper illustrates the value of initiatives which integrate education with conservation to achieve tangible outcomes, serving as a model for future collaborations between student volunteers and the heritage sector.

This article examines mudlarking, the practice of searching urban and coastal foreshores for historical objects, as a form of participatory archaeology that reveals how material, temporal, and social boundaries are continually negotiated. Using the concept of liminality as a theoretical lens, this article explores how mudlarking unsettles distinctions between land and water, past and present, and formal and informal knowledge, generating new ways of engaging with heritage in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad. Drawing on material culture theory, this article demonstrates how found objects serve as sites of social construction, where value and meaning shift through interpretation and context. By situating mudlarking within global and local frameworks of heritage governance, this article highlights tensions between protection, participation, and authority. Through comparative discussion of practices and policies—from the Portable Antiquities Scheme in England and Wales to heritage legislation in Aotearoa New Zealand—it is argued that mudlarking exemplifies a radical encounter between archaeology, community, and environment. This study reveals how everyday engagements with the material past can transform understandings of heritage and invite more inclusive, adaptive, and relational modes of environmental knowledge-making.

Today’s landscape of public archaeology foregrounds intentional practices, ensuring that archaeologists are aware of our actions and their repercussions. While we are intentional in our planning and implementation of public projects, this article argues that we are not adequately prepared for ending them. Many projects die for various reasons, get passed on to new generations of practitioners, and some simply come to a natural ending. A lack of discussion around project death, however, leads to unintentional endings or confusing continuities. Public archaeology is an intense emotional experience, and feelings of betrayal can emerge when a practitioner or the community partner exits the partnership unexpectedly. This article explores these issues from the perspective of an American scholar at a small public university and asks what an intentional ending to a public archaeology project looks like. It also asks how we can co-create and co-manage such an intentional ending with our community partners. Rather than fear the death of a project, there may be power in embracing the grief of ending a collaboration and soothing the emotional rupture. Finally, it concludes by suggesting that a rite of passage or celebration of the end may be necessary to mark the project as complete, allowing the partners to mourn and move on.

Handling and making objects can make an important contribution to learning, bringing sensory dimensions to understanding technology, style, and functions of objects; thus I use object-based learning as building blocks in my teaching of university students. In the context of the recent pandemic, I had dual concerns about the absence of physical engagement with objects and their materiality (during the long period classes pivoted online) and about the individual and collective well-being of our students, so I designed a new activity to address this in the context of an archaeology module on Minoan Crete. I asked each student to make their own votive offering, photograph/catalogue it, and place it in an experiential/experimental space by writing a prayer or other piece of creative writing about it. In this paper, I describe and reflect on the activity, using three years of collected data, together with student reflections made at the time of making the votive, plus additional interviews conducted later.

Archaeology is not new to public education. However, scholars of archaeology education have noted the lack of a systematic approach to the field in the last two decades. In our case study of the Trowels to Teaching Workshop, a five-day professional development program for Maryland K-12 educators conducted in 2025 through the Baltimore Community Archaeology Lab at Towson University, we offer a model for embedding archaeology education in existing applied archaeology programs in the academy. The workshop combined hands-on field and laboratory training, collaboration with Indigenous representatives from the Piscataway Conoy Tribe and the Pocomoke Indian Nation, and active participation by undergraduate student employees who both learned and taught archaeological skills. Formal pre- and post-assessments demonstrated significant learning gains among participating teachers, including increases in archaeological knowledge, confidence in lesson design, and awareness of descendant perspectives. The outcomes highlight how applied archaeology programs in universities can integrate teacher professional development into existing research, provide undergraduates with transformative teaching experiences, and deepen collaborations with descendant communities.

This case study presents the early stages of a deep mapping initiative in Charleston, South Carolina (USA). A foundational landscape for exploring the socioeconomic and political structures in the United States from the late 17th century to the present, the evidence for Charleston’s history is held in a variety of repositories, local and state agencies, and information curated by local communities and organizations. This rich resource mosaic creates an environment rich in information but complicated by varying levels of accessibility. The “Spatial History of Charleston” (SHOC) is a long-term mapping initiative that collates historical information about the Charleston area within a spatial and temporal framework. Within this endeavor lie interconnected issues related to scale, access, ownership, agency, and agenda. Employing a community-centered approach, SHOC seeks to navigate concerns about access, agency, ownership, and agenda, establishing a platform that increases access to data about and by communities, thereby democratizing information and facilitating integration and synthesis.

Since 2015, Danish school children have been able to explore science and research in their free time. Behind this initiative stands the Copenhagen-based NGO Videnskabsklubben (English: Science Club), which facilitates science programs running for seven weeks on an annual basis. What began as a series of clubs focused on the natural sciences has, as of 2024, expanded to include the humanities, with the launch of a nationwide archaeology program for pupils in the fourth and fifth grades (ages 10–12). The archaeology program was developed by archaeologists at the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions at Aarhus University. This article introduces the archaeology program as a best practice example of educational outreach. It also introduces the concept of Videnskabsklubben and examines the specific challenges and opportunities of integrating archaeology into a classroom setting. By this it hopefully inspires archaeologists and educators alike to initiate research-based activities within the humanities for school children.