Lisa Wilkins

Lisa Westcott Wilkins is creating ‘Social Impact Archaeology’ with Dig Ventures – a citizen-led archaeology that allows anyone to participate, using the field as a vector to enrich communities, place, make history accessible and relevant, preserve heritage, and create citizen scientists to help combat climate change.

Lisa has created Dig Ventures to upend traditional archaeology and position it as a public good--moving it beyond just objects--and creating a dynamic process intimately involving local communities. Everyone in the UK is informed by their historical environment: Lisa is positioning archaeology as a fundamental vector for building community, a sense of place and understanding of the community within it, and local engagement in the UK and beyond. She is tearing down the closed, hierarchical sector by creating a diverse movement of citizen archaeologists—true community-led heritage—and tapping into the power of archaeology to improve wellbeing, combatting the impacts of climate change, and build a powerful sense of place.

Lisa is opening archaeology to the people, instrumentalizing it as a vital tool for cultivating a sense of place and local identity. Though crowdfunding is not new, Lisa was the first in the world to create crowdfunded archaeological digs and offers training for anyone to participate as an archaeologist and contribute to a professional, data-driven dig in their community. She also offers a broad suite of online courses, reaching tens of thousands of participants worldwide. Archaeology has typically been the arena of the academic, or hidden behind hoardings, or done to check a bureaucratic box before the new roadway goes in. Lisa’s Dig Ventures puts ownership of digs, and of the knowledge they discover, in the hands of those whose backyards hold the treasures, offering dig opportunities and creating engagement with local community tourism boards, pop up shopfront museums, school programmes, and beyond.

Dig Ventures utilises local community beyond shovels, tapping into the crowd to source new information. Finds on digs are put online to source collective knowledge about their provenance, and digital volunteers are trained in new technologies in order to identify sites through aerial archaeology. Her initiative Deep Time is the current culmination of all these efforts, bringing together landowners, individuals, and major stakeholders to utilize archaeology to combat climate change. Land on a broad scale needs to be reconverted and regenerated to wildness in order to make an impact on climate, but must be archaeologically surveyed first. Lisa taps into the power of thousands of trained volunteers to use online tools and aerial photography to identify the best spots, preserve disappearing heritage, and speed up efforts by creating more archaeologists to support efforts. Her work is taking the intrinsic value of archaeology - knowledge creation - and expanding to encompass community identity, sense of place, and breaking down walls of a myopic field.

Archaeology is a closed sector, either an academic discipline or done for commercial purposes and kept under client confidentiality. There is less than one percent diversity within the field in the UK. Most archaeology literally occurs behind hoardings, denying the local community even a gawker’s understanding of the undertaking. It also has socio-economic barriers, requiring expensive advanced academic degrees or a minimum six-month experience on a dig, which is largely unpaid. Digs typically last for six weeks, a far longer time than most people can offer. This keeps archaeology available only to the well-heeled or specialised. Nationally owned heritage sites offer few opportunities for volunteers beyond serving as tour guides.

Archaeology is seen as an impediment to growth and development – the Roman ruin thwarting the shiny new skyscraper rather than a fundamental first step offering real value. These commercial organisations are typically registered as charities but see the extent of their social impact as digging up items and writing a report. Commercial archaeology makes up most of the sector and is primarily done to satisfy government regulations. Developers must excavate before building their structures and hire archaeologists to do this as cheaply and quickly as possible. This lowers quality and pay sector-wide, and positions archaeology as a box-checking exercise.

It is also often seen as nothing but a process of uncovering objects, rather than a dynamic process of uncovering community knowledge. The knowledge that is uncovered is often not recorded in a rigorous way or made accessible to the communities surrounding the sites where it was found. Scientific data is kept behind a paywall and discoveries are subject to strict, slow publishing cycles. An artifact is found in a dig, sent for study for eighteen months, then the information uncovered is published years later, after the dig is over, in journals inaccessible to the public.

The medical field has lay first responders – police officers who arrive before the ambulance, athletic coaches trained in defibrillation, etc – but archaeology is still kept within the confines of the highly trained. Many of the most exciting archaeological discoveries are found by people doing who aren’t archaeologists – the digger driver in the construction site, the backyard gardener, the farmer with a plough, who do not have the knowledge to preserve their accidental discoveries, let alone derive social value from them. Archaeology is fractured into various sectors: museum sector, academia, commercial, community works, and field workers, leaving little cohesion or power to change the field.

The United Kingdom is not on target to meet Net Zero by 2030. These targets have been set by the government without much funding or guidance to achieve them. In order to move forward to meet these targets, 70,000 hectares of land per year needs to be rewilded, reforested, or otherwise turned over to climate mitigation. At the same time, the UK, like many countries around the world, has stringent laws about archaeological heritage – in order for sites such as those owned by the National Trust, (owner of 10% of UK’s land) to be rewilded, they must undergo an archaeological survey to find sites of historic importance. There are not enough archaeologists to carry out this work and, at the current rate, it will take years before this land is freed up for climate mitigation. In addition, climate change has a dramatic effect on archaeology around the world– ancient wood dries out and turns to dust from dropping water tables and increasing temperatures. The coastal Butrint, in Albania, is predicted to be the first World Heritage site lost to climate change.

Lisa is breaking open the closed doors of archaeology and creating a movement of archaeology in partnership with the public through Dig Ventures. She is building non-academic pathways to engage people in archaeology – the digger driver on construction sites, the gardener, the local historian – through crowdfunded digs, an open policy on data and learnings, online training programmes, and by training regular people to participate in archaeological digs. She believes that by helping people learn about their history, they can better understand their community and its future.

Lisa created the world’s first crowd-funded archaeological dig with Flag Fen Lives, a Bronze-Age site. Traditionally, digs are grant-funded or done in order to check a box before a new development goes in. With Flag Fen Lives, Lisa engaged 250 crowd-funders, trained 130 people in archaeological field skills to help with the dig, and hosted 2,200 visitors – a 30% increase in average tourism for the entire area. Her crowd-funded digs release Dig Ventures from a dependence on grant funding, expanding what digs they can focus on, and giving the community a true stake in the process. Since 2012, Dig Ventures has raised £2 million in crowd- and grant funding.

Lisa thinks anyone can become an archaeologist. Through her Dig Ventures training, anyone can be trained and work on a dig within a day. Her hybrid digital and in-person volunteering opportunities open archaeology to groups previously barred by their circumstances: those in wheelchairs, the immunocompromised, and those who can’t afford it.

The digs follow all professional standards, and have a rigorous documentation system, with data available to anyone who asks. Participants are trained to answer questions from interested passers-by. Dig Ventures also guides participants through the process of understanding loss and death as an unavoidable, and valuable part of the work. Uncovering burial grounds, personal touches on an axe head, reverse-engineering a day through a pile of ancient garbage: these kinds of experiences can have a profound effect on participants.

Archaeology is a profound knowledge creator – offering communities an understanding of their own past, a new sense of place, the implications of the heritage in their literal backyards. An ancient stream bed hosts early civilization, then Viking settlements, then Romans, and the streets of modern housing estates, whose streets follow the streambed: the effects of an archaeological past are everywhere, but unknown to those who live within them. To combat the established practice in traditional archaeology of digs happening behind hoardings, Lisa and Dig Ventures involve a wide variety of community actors, some unexpected. They engage with tourism boards, local museums, after school programmes, local history groups, hire local interns, and create pop-up museums in shopfronts. In each area, Dig Ventures maps out an individual theory of change, tacked to standards of evidence. They have hosted digs across the United Kingdom. The opportunity to participate in these digs has become a kind of bucket list item, part of the experience economy which people give for birthdays or to people in the last stages of their life. She offers ‘Dirty Weekends’ for potential diggers, as well as family events such as Dig Camp and Dig Club.

Dig Ventures uses digital tools to dramatically increase its impact. When COVID-19 shut down their digs, they pivoted to the online space and found an opportunity to reach a truly global audience. They offer a broad suite of online courses, from how to record the findings of a dig to how to excavate a skeleton - reaching 44,000 people in ninety-two countries. She has built a subscription model with 900 subscribers – many of whom have never joined a dig – fully funding two of her sixteen staff. Lisa has designed Dig Ventures as a not for profit limited company with an asset lock ensuring legally 100% of the income generated through subscriptions and crowdfunding is reinvested into the central mission.

Dig Ventures has strong impact measurement tools, using pre-and post- event surveys looking at how the work affects participants, how it affects the archaeology, and the impact of people having a chance to support archaeology. It looks at how people change in understanding, how they change, and why they chose to participate. Lisa has measured very high levels of return participation in Dig Ventures, as well as high levels of people going into the archaeological field or study, increased local engagement, and dramatic increases in active volunteering after participation. Lisa sees how inclusion in Dig Ventures helps people understand the past in a way that is unbounded and lets people who live in landscapes be a part of understanding them. She is striving to make archaeology a public service and public good.

Lisa is using her new tools of archaeology to combat climate change. The changing temperature has unexpected effects on historical heritage – coastal erosion means history is underwater, and indiscriminate rewilding can bury pieces of history. In order to make any inroads into the climate crisis, her initiative Deep Time uses citizen-led archaeology combined with new technology to help speed up rewilding for climate mitigation. The National Trust owns ten percent of the land in the UK. 700 square kilometres of land will need to be surveyed each year in order to given over to reforestation, rewilding, peatland reclamation and coastal mitigation to make a dent in the rapidly increasing climate temperatures. All these land types are historic environments but largely unmapped. The UK legal landscape requires a heritage assessment for this environmental reclamation to move forward. Deep Time is helping the UK bring vast swathes of land in service to climate mitigation far faster than would happen otherwise, and creating a pilot which could be applied to land around the world, including in conflict areas where archaeologists cannot go in person, or in the Global South.

Deep Time, in partnership with Europa Nostra and NESTA, uses aerial satellite tools such as GIS and Lidar and a short online training course to teach digital volunteers to identify areas of archaeological interest on the land. A learning management system helps participants make scientifically valid contributions and collaborate by validating each other’s site identifications. This programme has built a corps of people who are deeply invested in crowdsourcing heritage sites. It has uncovered thousands of archaeological sites – sixty percent more archaeology than in the existing record. Lisa’s crowdsourced work had a ninety-two percent accuracy rate compared to sixty two percent for tools previously in use. Lisa calls it ‘cultural heritage capital’ – repositioning what people see in archaeology, and what it can offer broader society, and creating a new system to interrogate the historic record. Similar work would’ve cost the National Trust £2 million and years to undertake. Deep Time makes it happen in one month rather than eighteen months – dramatically increasing the amount of land returned to climate mitigation. They have received inquiries about the work from South Sudan and other countries in the Global South, who are struggling to map and preserve priceless heritage being lost to conflict and climate change, and build a sense of ownership and place. It has practical applications as well – ancient, lost irrigation channels have been identified and repurposed again. This work has powerful implications for use in cities around the world seeking net zero, the Global South, conflict zones, and areas unsafe for archaeologists to work on the ground.

Dig Ventures has roughly twenty active excavation sites. They also do broader surveys, without digging, and the range of policy and digital projects. The work of Dig Ventures has begun to be copied by other major organisations. They were the first to build a true core of public engagement in archaeology. The Museum of London has adopted some of their approach towards community engagement, and several significant funding bodies such as the National Lottery Heritage Fund have begun adding a community component to their grant criteria. The Chartered Institute of Archaeologists has commissioned Dig Ventures to produce a toolkit for the sector on how to imbed public benefit in archaeology undertaken through the government planning system – a seismic shift for the sector. Lisa and Dig Ventures work to inculcate their ideas through a kind of digital scaling and advocacy with other organisations around the world. With Dig Digital, they are streamlining ways to archive digital information, work with metadata, and synchronize and systematize data. Beyond the UK, she has hosted digs in the United States and Spain and been asked to expand into the USA and Canada.

Born and raised in the United States, Lisa felt ostracized as a child. Her childhood became defined by being ‘othered,’ and left out of social groups. These experiences marked Lisa deeply. She had a love of books, learning, and athletics, and found herself trying to achieve her way out of these early traumas and blows to her self-esteem. An athletic star, she became a professional soccer player, playing in the US and for international UK teams such as Millwall. When her athletic career ended, she found herself adrift without that intense level of competition, support, and guidance. She moved into a job in finance but found herself utterly unsatisfied: “I tried so hard to love money and I couldn’t.’

One night, Lisa looked at her bookshelf and realised it was populated entirely by archaeology books. She realised her only interest outside of sports was archaeology. She finally took the leap and left the finance world, earning a masters degree in Archaeology at University College London. Her confidence had been so low that she hadn’t dared to pursue her entrepreneurial passions previously. She returned to the UK to take the helm as editor of Current Archaeology magazine, a floundering publication she managed to turn around. She was named the first Clore Fellow in 2010, a profound experience which opened her to her own broader potential as a leader. During her time at Clore, she worked to design an evaluation programme for the Cultural Olympiad organised in tandem with the 2012 London Olympics. She wondered why archaeology was not included as part of the cultural offerings, and proposed archaeological events be included. She was also struck by how the Olympics – seemingly the ultimate equalizer – had a high barrier to entry for people across the UK, with expensive travel and scarce, pricey tickets. Lisa organised an archaeological dig in Flag Fen, a forgotten site in a downtrodden corner of the UK, far from the London hubbub. She scheduled it to be held during the Olympics, and her efforts brought in 250 diggers and 3000 visitors to the site. She organized a large-scale public art piece (a life-size bouncy castle Stonehenge) installed by a famous artist, which brought huge publicity. These combined efforts led to such a growth in local support and awareness that a planned pipeline through the site was re-routed.

After reading an article that ten percent of films at Sundance were crowd-funded, and seeing the dearth of similar initiatives of any sort at the time in the UK, Lisa set up the Dig Ventures website. Seeing the tremendous gaps in the sector – and the potential for social change wasted, she co-founded Dig Ventures with her husband Brendan, with Lisa taking the lead on driving the vision and leading the organisation, and serving as CEO.

Lisa’s early experiences came in handy within the work of Dig Ventures. As often happens with people changing paradigms, she was ostracised by her sector. Her boundary-pushing work made the archaeological field uncomfortable. However, Lisa had experience being in this position, and drew on that to move forward, designing Dig Ventures around ironclad principles of inclusion and openness. She built in structures of collaboration, with her participants validating each other’s finds, and working in tandem – making sure that everyone would be involved and included.