The archaeological sector is making headway in the move towards a more public-focused practice, with projects of all scales doing community events and encouraging participation. The ways that we talk about this type of work can vary depending on its context, with legal and planning frameworks often steering the conversations to respond to specific requirements.

These are always developing, but the language remains complicated and often confusing, so I thought it would be useful to provide a basic glossary of terms. These will clarify what we mean, and act as a reminder of how they might apply to development-led archaeology.

Overarching terminology

We can start with a big one: public value. In the UK this has a very specific meaning and is generally capitalised: Public Value. It combines the ideas of public benefit and value for (public) money and is part of the decision-making process for archaeological work funded in whole or in part by taxpayers.

The overarching guidance for these decisions is held within HM Treasury’s The Green Book. For example, projects funded by Historic England go through an assessment process to establish whether a project is designed to create the optimum public value from the investment of public money.

The context for this within development-led archaeology will usually relate to projects funded by direct taxation: mainly roads, railways and other transport infrastructure.

For private sector-funded archaeological projects, public benefit is the term we might use to refer to the way in which archaeologists can maximise the contribution that our work makes to communities. It is in fact often the vaguest of all the terms we could use although it has a very specific legal definition that we rarely mean when we use it.

All charities registered with the Charity Commission must be set up with a ‘public benefit requirement’, a legally binding aspect of setting up a charity whereby both the ‘public’ and the ‘benefit’ parts of the term are defined specifically.

Many of the larger archaeological contractors in the UK are charities and as such, have their own public benefit purposes. For example, MOLA is an educational charity with the aim of: ‘stimulate enquiry and promote active discovery through partnership and participation, widening access to and appreciation of the value of heritage.’

Public interest is easier to define, describing the obligation placed on professionals to put the public interest above their own, or their clients’ interests. For example, a doctor will treat patients without prejudice, a lawyer will defend a criminal regardless of their alleged crime.

For archaeologists, acting in the public interest is what distinguishes a profession from an industry  and our professional body the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists’ code of conduct is the ethical framework for this.

Specific and measurable terminology

Used commonly across the construction industry, social value is another legally defined term that has become more widespread over recent years. I have written about this term and its legal definition before and we are now working towards fulfilling the various expectations on our public-focused aspects of development-led archaeology projects.

Other terms that are often used interchangeably but mean slightly different things include social benefit, which means the whole benefit of purchasing a good or service, so a combination of private (benefit to an individual) and public (benefit to the whole of society). A relevant example could be increased skills and knowledge for an individual gained through a training programme, leading to reduced spending by wider society on unemployment support.

For our purposes, we could use this term for the intended benefit we want our work to provide, but it would need to be defined for both the individual and the wider society.

Public impact and social impact are, put simply, usually used to refer to impacts upon the public and society (which are broadly the same thing here), although they also have specific meanings in other contexts. Public impact can mean the impact on people of public policies (ie those originating from the Government), and social impact can refer to the impact on wider society by a policy or action (for example building a school).

As archaeologists we might use them slightly differently, to show our intention to provide positive impacts through our work, so for example, by calling our outreach and engagement work our Public Impact.

I favour being clear in language and intention, so using phrases like human-centred activities is useful when we are specifically reacting to human needs rather than a client-led project requirement, or a more abstract idea such as merely using ‘innovation’.

The word public is also problematic as it tends to assume a generic population, which is far from the case of course. So generally I use ‘publics’ instead, to show that I understand the complexity of ‘the public’ and am prepared to drill down into detailed analysis of specific communities.

Which term is best and how should we use them?

All the terms outlined here relate in one way or another to making a change through action, either for individuals or for wider society. Critical and common to all is the need to establish what you mean by it; and then commit to the change, pushing forwards through project design and implementation; and crucially, evaluating the change at appropriate stages.

For this reason, I tend to use social value more often than others, as there are many ways that it can be measured and reported on, and the construction sector is familiar with it as a concept and a practical mechanism for encouraging positive change.

 

Public benefit