Anthropreneur

Society is an organic whole. The same change happens at once in different places. Co-creation is a major trend in the marketplace toward the collaborative construction of brands, products and advertising content by the producers and the consumers. The impact of co-creation is dramatic: consumers develop new cultures around brands, while companies alter their rigid organizational principles to become more democratic. Academic disciplines are a lot like traditional corporate citadels: they “study” society and then claim an exclusive right to represent it by means of books, universities, museums and think tanks. One of these disciplines, archaeology, is responsible for the production of cultural heritage. Archaeology seems to be an unlikely place for a change to occur. However, as Archaeology Metamedia Lab at Stanford demonstrates, it has also started to embrace the spirit of co-creation. As Michael Shanks writes, “archaeologists and heritage managers have come to accept their responsibility to listen to stakeholder interests in history and the archaeological remains of the past.” One of the most unusual cases of collaboration between academic archaeologists and lay communities is the Çatalhöyük Archaeological Site in Turkey. The grandiose remains of the earliest urban center dated back to 9,000 YPB and the traces of an ancient feminine cult attracted the international Goddess movement. The Goddess feminist movement draws some inspiration from various archeological and anthropological findings claiming that many ancient societies were matriarchal. Director of the Çatalhöyük Archaeological Project, Stanford professor Ian Hodder, invited representatives of the Goddess movement to the site and solicited their interpretations of the findings. The Goddess groups went as far as setting up, with the help of UNESCO, a version of local crafts inspired by the findings. Reflexive archaeology that Hodder and Shanks advocate acknowledges that our interpretations of history are capable of determining our future.  New archaeology takes responsibility for the academic production of the past and opens the gates for the consumers to participate in the construction of their own cultural identity.