 So, thanks first and foremost to the organizers for allowing me to speak here. What I will be presenting is mentioned in the program as a co-authored paper, but in developing this it has become very much my own vault piece, so I would just like to especially thank my co-authors because they were very closely involved in the community archaeology projects that are at the base of what I'm going to talk about, but I don't want them to be implicated in anything stupid that I might be saying. I'm going to start with what will maybe come across as a little bit of a caricature, but I don't think it's too far from the truth to say that the professionalization of archaeology that has happened in the 90s and 2000s, and I'm speaking from a Flemish-Belgian perspective here, has led to an alienation of the public where it has become in many cases very hard for the public to see the actual benefit or value in contract archaeology, development-led archaeology, or even not to see it as just a nuisance and not much else. And if public archaeology happens, and I think it's happening more and more also where I work in Flanders, it's still very often a one-way communication, the archaeologists telling the public that stays behind the fence what he has been doing or what he is doing in the field. The question is, can we democratize this routine archaeology of contract work of development-led Malta archaeology, as we could call it? I would like to briefly introduce the projects that these faults that I'm expressing here have developed from. We have done two, well three seasons basically on two different sites in Western Flanders, where we've worked very closely with a variety of public actors. And so these public actors, those included actual volunteers on the side, but also people washing shirts, detectorists active on the side, we gave tours to people and so on. But I think the most important public actors that we engaged with were the actual owners of the sites. In one case, this was the municipality, which was owning a site that they wanted to redevelop. In another case, it was a private owner of a scheduled monument, which was being refurbished. And both these owners, these actors were characterized by a few things. First of all, they were the ones coming to us taking the initiative to ask, well, things are going to happen on this side, but from a strictly legal perspective, what needs to be done here is very limited. Archeology here is very limited, our obligations in archaeology are very limited. And they wanted to do more. They were willing to invest in that money, but also logistics, all kinds of support. And in the end, the fieldwork that we did, the work that we did exceeded not the legal boundaries, of course, but the legal minimum requirements. So we did more, we provided more archaeology, more content, more work than what would have happened if these owners would have followed the easy path, maybe, of what is provided in the law, or required from the law. And I think this is a model to explore this very close engagement with interested public actors, as opposed to the imposed archaeology that I talked about just now that is seen as a burden by the public. What are the motivations of these public actors? Well, of course, this is what we like to see most in our volunteers, the people that we engage with this is a selfless historical interest. But what is important as well here is that there were other motivations, very clearly. There was a social cultural, there were social cultural benefits. There were economic benefits from this archaeology in the sense that the refurbishment of this site, this monument that I talked about, where we worked, was aimed at developing kind of a meeting place and cafe. So there was a very commercial project in the end. In the municipality that we worked, this is a place where they want to develop tourism. So archaeology draws in tourists. We become part of the social, the cultural agenda of that village in the coastal region during the summer season. It's important to not to valorize these different motivations of public actors. I think they are important. And as archaeologists, we come to archaeology with a preference for historical meaning and so on. But I think these public actors see other things in archaeology. And we can summarize those in what archaeology actually does on a site. It is the process of placemaking in that it produces a locally anchored narrative, both in the outcomes of the archaeology, in that we make new history, so to speak. We make the historical story about that place more complete, but also in that from the people who are involved, the public that is involved with the project, we add a new story to that place just by doing fieldwork there. It is community building because with site tours, with volunteers actually involved on the site, local people appropriate this narrative. And finally, there's also the physicality of archaeology in that the monumental remains, the finds, they have a persistence that helps to anchor this narrative that we develop. So I think archaeology has a very big potential for other valorizations except just the scientific or the heritage value in a societally broad meaning. And the archaeologist in this becomes an equal participant. He has his own valorizations, of course, his own reasons for being there, which are scientific and as I said, also broadly. So it's always going to say suicidal, but it's societal, of course. But it's important to note that these might go against these other participants' aims or motivations. There's a danger of commoditization of archaeological heritage, for instance, here, of certain unethical practices or things that just go against the law, not because these other actors are ill-meaning, but just because we as archaeologists come to the site with a certain expertise and knowledge of the ontology and legislation. And instead of using just authority as we usually do, we come out from afar as an archaeologist. We are the experts, we know what we're doing, we do what we need to do and we move out again. In this negotiation process, I think authenticity is a much more interesting aspect because it can also be a positive value used in enhancing this process of working with the public actors. And I include this Facebook post, not because my face is on it, but because it illustrates this effect of authority rather than authenticity rather than authority quite nicely. This is me arriving at one of the sites geared up with the total station and so on. What the owner did was take a picture, put it on Facebook, let all people engage with it, so it immediately becomes part of the visibility of that site, the outreach. And of course for the owner, it's a way to enhance the status of the site that he wants to develop as well. How do we implement this? So currently in Flanders and I imagine it's much the same over most of Europe. We have this process, a routine administrative process whereby if a site is going to be developed or works are going on and you come across something archaeological, there's a certain routine that decides whether there's going to be excavation or further research or not. And the criteria for that are, as I said, scientific value and very broad heritage value. What if we see this participatory process as a third way? If there are public partners, parties with an active interest and a willingness to invest, importantly, then I think we can have a negotiated decision making process and that can be on the level of logistics. When is this going to happen? How is this going to happen? How can we facilitate this archaeology? Also in terms of the content, what story do we want to make here? What is the most interesting feature of this site? And in that we have to consider non-archeological valorizations as alternative criteria to the ones I just mentioned. So that might mean that a site that would not have been excavated because its surplus value in terms of knowledge creation is limited might have huge value in terms of these alternative valorizations of place making or community building and in that sense it is worth investing there and doing archaeology. In conclusion, I think the democratic archaeology very broadly fits into the current trend of active citizenship where people are very locally active, try to engage with where they live, try to improve their environment in a very positive and creative way. It involves public actors as equal partners and crucially their motivations as equally valid as the ones that we as outsider archaeologists arrive with on the site. Archaeologists in this view become not the outside experts that call the shots, they become negotiators that have to work with these local motivations for doing archaeology with broader requirements of archaeology and the bottom line of this is that this will help to mitigate the alienating effects of professional contract development led archaeology by more visibly creating value for everyone, all the involved partners at the scene so to speak but also society as a whole. Thank you very much.