Community archaeology and heritage in Africa: Conversations inspired by a workshop

In March 2014 Peter Schmidt and Innocent Pikirayi invited us to join a workshop as interlocutors with archaeologists and heritage experts engaged in participatory projects in sub-Saharan Africa. As with all such workshops, the papers (now chapters in this volume) reflect feedback and discussion, but do not always have the space to situate their work and contributions in broader discussions of community-based and heritage discourses. This piece does not intend to fulfill that goal, because the introductory chapter by Peter Schmidt and Innocent Pikirayi already does that. Instead, we are providing provocations and demonstrating heterogeneity of approaches for future considerations through a conversation between the three of us. We are not responding to individual papers, but rather exploring topics that emerged during the workshop and in the papers themselves. We also hope this will communicate some flavor of the immediacy and intellectual energy that we all experienced during the course of this intense week-long workshop. To begin with, we must contend with our own standpoints.