On 7 July 2012, the eyes of the world were focused on London in anticipation of the start of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Just over 100 miles to the north, though, my eyes instead beheld a gargantuan, full-scale, bouncy castle replica of Stonehenge, dappled with the collapsed and sweaty bodies of a very red Francis Pryor and several members of the DigVentures team attempting to catch their breath after an hour of vigorous jumping among the inflatable trilithons.
This unlikely moment, dreamed into being by artist and ‘instigator of social interventions’ Jeremy Deller, was one of the flagship events of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad public arts festival. Its installation at Flag Fen, a Bronze Age site just outside Peterborough, served as the launch celebration for Flag Fen Lives, DigVentures’ inaugural dig and the world’s first-ever successfully crowdfunded archaeological excavation.
DigVentures has appeared in CA several times (see CA 302, and news stories in CA 266, 351, 357, and 383), covering signature digs and star finds as well as articles profiling our digital innovation projects, hybrid participation events, citizen science activities, and bespoke impact evaluation methodology for archaeology. For this special issue of Current Archaeology, we were asked to look back, as well as forward, to make predictions about the future for archaeology through the lens of DV’s work.
Göbekli Tepe: a new World Heritage Site