Are we all just having fun?

Recently I read about Forestry England asking the public to become “autumn spotters”, recording changing leaf colours to help build a national picture of how a hotter, drier climate is rearranging the seasons. Sign me up!

This is another lovely example of opportunities that seem to be everywhere – count butterflies, monitor rivers, map a footpath, help an archive, dig on an archaeological site. And folks are showing up, year after year, because people have an extraordinary appetite to contribute their time and attention to things they care about. What is interesting about this is that, in addition to being a bit of fun, these activities are also data collection at a scale that is impossible for professional teams. Combined, this good clean fun is also a vast reservoir of civic energy looking for meaning and purpose.

We tend to file these participatory activities under ‘leisure’, a pleasant way to spend a Saturday, fun for the family, and that’s mostly how they show up in our public value and cultural heritage capital accounting frameworks. But I’m sitting here jumping up and down about something that hasn’t been recognised or counted: ordinary people are taking active part in the making of public knowledge and the stewardship of shared things.

That might be leisure, but isn’t it also active citizenship? The OECD has spent years arguing that citizen participation is a question of democratic legitimacy. And here it is! Where can we count it?!

DV thinks about this quite a lot through the work of our Deep Time project, which produces professional-quality landscape intelligence via holding, growing and progressing a vibrant and active community. In the case of Deep Time, our evaluation shows that participation is a demonstration of care, values, and a desire to act. Wietse van der Werf, Founder and CEO of the Sea Ranger Service, makes a related point in a recent Substack post: Are Nature Organisations Too Volunteer Dependent?

Wietse’s point is that the environmental sector sits on an enormous supply of human motivation but has largely built itself to treat that motivation as free labour rather than something that can develop into capability, responsibility and progression. His Sea Ranger Service does something different, creating pathways from participation into training, paid work and professional capability. In other words, it takes the energy seriously enough to harness it and give it somewhere to go.

So far this season, 657 people have taken part across six DigVentures excavations. They ranged in age from 17 to over 85 and came from 13 countries on four continents. Forty-five per cent of the 627 participants who answered our previous-experience question were doing archaeology for the first time.

The numbers are nice but it doesn’t stop there for us, because we are obsessed with finding out what participation actually means. We’ve redesigned our evaluation process right down to the trench edge, and it’s already showing us so much more than we bargained for. Our old forms caught a highlight from roughly one participant in ten; asking everyone directly on their last day with us raised that to nine in ten. It is a gold mine of what participation means.

People love finding things. The thrill of discovery was far and away the biggest highlight, but people also talked about developing skills, doing real archaeology, working with others, seeing their children participate, and even the therapeutic quality of the work. Thirty participants identified watching their child or companion take part as their own highlight.

If we look at the same activity through the lens of active citizenship, a much more interesting picture emerges.

Take our new partnership project at Rossett, near Wrexham. Over twelve days, 117 people worked alongside our team to excavate the first complete Roman villa in Wales. Together they uncovered an opus signinum floor, painted wall plaster, Roman coins and window glass, and a clay-lined lime-slaking pit. Participants helped record it all, contributing to 111 context records, 23 registered finds, 21 environmental samples and 16 scale drawings. That archive will go to the Historic Environment Record and into the story our Rossett project tells about itself.

Our Venturers are not simply consuming a cultural experience: they are contributing to research, creating evidence, learning specialist skills, building relationships around place and, in some cases, producing data that professionals and public bodies can use. Showing up with a desire to be entertained can live side by side with using individual agency, time and knowledge to shape the shared conditions of society. Participation can be seen as a vehicle for treating people as a producer of public value, not a consumer of public services.

That doesn’t mean dressing up every community dig as democracy in action, because sometimes digging a Roman villa is simply just really fun. Long live fun! But fun and public value are not mutually exclusive. One might actually be rather good at generating the other, and perhaps that’s the bit we’ve been missing when we try to express the true value of archaeology.

But what do I know? I’m just reading too much and asking too many awkward questions. Time to get my trowel out!