Outstanding Public Archaeology Initiative Award

Diggin’ In: Digital Conversations with Archaeologists was selected for the Society for American Archaeology’s 2023 Outstanding Public Archaeology Initiative Award.

Award notification letter sent to MAS President, Victor Mastone

The program began on June 24, 2020, and ended on December 7, 2022 and offered live presentation and published video series, which was hosted by The Massachusetts Archaeological Society (MAS) and the Robert S. Peabody Institute for Archaeology (RSP).

Started the program as a lifeline for public engagement during pandemic lockdowns, the Diggin’ In series emerged as an outstanding educational offering. Creator and co-producer Lindsay Randall (MAS Trustee, formerly Curator of Education at RSP) and co-producer Dr. Suanna Selby Crowley (MAS Past President and current Trustee) designed Diggin’ In to achieve two key goals: (1) to connect the general public to research by emerging or under-represented scholars in archaeology and related fields, and (2) to spotlight innovative or marginalized research topics, themes, methodologies, or cultural materials that expand on traditional scholarship.

Over the course of five seasons, 49 episodes were broadcast live over Zoom and welcomed more than 350 registrants from across the United States and four countries. The series earned nearly 7,000 views on YouTube – plus more than 40,000 impressions and almost 250 subscribers for the MAS alone. (See the MAS channel and RSP channel for reference.) This is in addition to positive audience response (liking, sharing, and commenting on Facebook and Instagram) for both organizations. 

The Diggin’ In series also generated media coverage on archaeology for a story about cemeteries in Salem, MA (S3:E2), and was the venue for breaking news on a discovery related to African-American history from Colonial Williamsburg (S3:E5). It has inspired similar programs for other state archaeological societies, prompting a new wave of educational outreach through promotional partnerships with SAA’s Council of Allied Societies, the Conference on New England Archaeology, the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology, and the Eastern States Archaeological Federation. 

Similarly, Diggin’ In has influenced the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (a section of the American Anthropological Association) in the creation of their sNAPAshots: Conversations with Applied, Professional, and Practicing Anthropologists video series. And finally, it has been used as instructional content in secondary, undergraduate, and graduate level courses about history, cultural anthropology, and archaeology.