Archaeology, Heritage Making and Well-being: Is There a Recipe? (original) (raw)

In the relationship between people and the environment, a central theme in the European Green Deal, Cultural Heritage, representing the common roots that connect people and spaces and generate communities, is crucial. This paper deals with the reclaim of illegal possessed areas to local communities by creating Cultural Heritage through the archaeological research. The case study is the first stretch of the via Appia. This area condenses a complicated mixture of social, urban and naturalistic instances, abandonment, archaeological legacies, unexpressed potential and the need for an urgent intervention of sustainable re-conjunction to the urban spaces. Our research approached the issue from a macro scale, with an analysis of the local communities’ perceptions, and from site level, focusing on communities’ involvement in the archaeological research processes. Involving the community in the heritage-making process in the on-field activities means to create an empathic connection within the discovery event of a common past, a strategic step in perceiving feelings of belonging to an ‘heritage community’. Moreover, making accessible, ie. ‘public’, the methodologies and procedures of the archaeological research means to allow a shared deductive process of understanding archaeological features, preliminary step of the interpretation process necessary for any cultural value assignment.