Summary
The conduct of archaeology has a profound effect on communities all over the world. People attribute values to their heritage and as a result may classify archaeology as an important part of their lives. While this valuation goes one way, from people onto their archaeological heritage, the very conduct of archaeology and supporting archeological activities also generates impact into these people?s lives.The economic impact of archaeology has been the subject of various impact evaluation studies in the last decades, but the sociocultural impact of archaeology only recently gained attention. The cause for this is the growing pressure on governments to deal with sociological aspects, mainly based on rapid social change. As a result, the importance of the sociocultural impact of archaeology has been acknowledged by institutions such as the European Union, UNESCO and ICOMOS. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how to evaluate and measure sociocultural impact and how to integrate this data with the, often already available, economic data. As cultural heritage has more values than the economic, development has more aspects than economic (even more the sustainable development). There is a growing need to create sustainable archaeological practices around the world and the evaluation and integration of both economic and sociocultural impact could be the key in the creation of a comprehensive and practical framework usable in future heritage practices.Then, this proposal is based on the consideration on heritage and archaeology as development factors, not as economical sectors (as could be an Economical Analysis of Commercial Archaeology, by instance).As members of the NEARCH project, which aims to create new and sustainable ways of interacting with (local) heritage communities, we propose to organize a session on sustainable archaeological practices and call for papers which can be submitted into three categories:a) Theoretical contributions: covering the key concepts of the session: economic and social impact, sustainability, social innovation, heritage value, relationships between social and economic value;b) Analytical and empirical contributions: covering concrete experiences in measuring the generation of economic and/or social value relating to heritage and archaeology, and in measuring the economic and social impact of archaeological heritage.c) Contributions on Social Innovation: covering new ways of generating social and economic value, related to, for example, crowdfunding, collaborative consumption, cooperatives, social currency, and ethical finances.While various NEARCH partners will contribute papers to this session, it is also open for proposals by external parties and welcomes each contribution.