Experiments in Crowd-funding Community Archaeology

Abstract

This article reviews existing case studies in the ‘crowd-funding’ of community archaeology, as well as offering preliminary results from a small-scale experiment conducted alongside the wider crowd-sourcing efforts of the MicroPasts project (http://micropasts.org). In so-doing, it also considers the possible role of a hybrid reward- and donation-based model for micro-financing collaborative archaeological research. The article concludes with a summary of the key lessons drawn from experiences of crowd-funding archaeology so far, and highlights their particular implications for community archaeology.