Like many rural communities, the inhabitants of Nikitari village are absent from the national heritage narrative. Tourists visit the local UNESCO World Heritage site of Panayia Phorviotissa but leave knowing little about the people who inhabited the landscape around it or the community the bus drove through to get there.

PATH is a pilot project in community based participatory research and thus it confronts the dominant research model in archaeology on the island in which little meaningful interaction takes places between archaeological projects and the communities that these projects work in. Villagers take an active role in the project, making decisions about project design, methods and outcomes.

Pathways to Heritage works with the village of Nikitari, a rural village like many in Cyprus, and asks its inhabitants, ‘what places, activities and objects are meaningful to you?’ PATH explores the processes through which connections to the past (distant and recent) are made. It uses participatory techniques like Participant Employed Photography and Video Walks to explore the processes of heritage formation – how people engage with the past through proximity and physical interaction. Heritage is viewed as a dynamic process – it does ‘social, political and cultural ‘work’ in society (Smith and Waterton 2009, 41).

It views the dynamic process of heritage formation and its role in connecting people and communities (belonging and identity) as inseparable from tangible heritage ‘things’.

Three interwoven and interdependent principals guide this research:

1) A community based approach to research requires focussing on research that is relevant to local communities. It directly engages communities in the research process from its conceptualisation through its data collection, interpretation and dissemination.

2) Heritage is a process of engaging with the past (doing the ‘work’ necessary) to keep it alive in the present

3) All archaeological fieldwork is embodied and emplaced. The position and role of researcher needs to be questioned as part of research process (i.e. role of researcher in heritage formation).

For information, please visit: www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/research/archaeologyrese...

Dr. Erin Gibson

Marie Curie Fellow

Archaeology, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow

1 University Gardens

Glasgow G12 8QQ

This project as received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 657370