Thesis title: La comunità locale e il suo patrimonio. Sfide, strategie e prospettive globali per l’applicazione dell’archeologia di comunità
Over the past few decades, community archaeology has assumed an increasingly central role in the international debate on local community involvement in archaeological research and cultural heritage management. Despite the growing diffusion of participatory approaches, self-critical evaluations remain limited, and shared interpretive and evaluative tools to support the analysis of the sustainability of relationships among communities, researchers, and heritage are still lacking. As the field has spread globally, this issue has become particularly pressing in non-Anglophone contexts such as Western Asia. Here, community archaeology practices encounter power asymmetries between local and foreign actors, sociopolitical complexities, and a limited scholarly output on territorially oriented evaluation. The present research responds to this gap by exploring the development of an evaluative contribution grounded in a cross-analysis of two experiences carried out at Tell Hisban/Hisban in Jordan and Arslantepe/Orduzu in Türkiye. A qualitative approach was adopted, based on participant observation, field notes, and in-depth semi-structured interviews. This approach was selected because it enables a deeper understanding of the phenomena by exploring the meanings that local communities attribute to them. Data analysis was developed through an iterative coding process using the open-source software CATMA, integrated with systematic comparison of the two case studies and critical engagement with international literature. The results reveal heterogeneous relational configurations, characterized by varying levels of participation, integration between local knowledge and archaeological expertise, articulation of social and cultural capital, and forms of community activation, all shaped by multiple combinations of contextual factors. The study demonstrates that these dynamics cannot be understood independently of the specific contexts in which they develop. More precisely, participatory processes are continuously influenced by the interaction between internal project-based factors and external contextual variables of a social, cultural, economic, political, and institutional nature, which may facilitate, constrain, or redefine outcomes. This points to the impossibility of identifying universally transferable models, underscoring the need for locally sensitive approaches. Within this framework, community archaeology operates primarily as a relational process, capable of strengthening, reactivating, and reworking the existing connections between communities and heritage in the present. Against this background, the proposed model stems precisely from the impossibility of identifying linear and universally applicable relationships. Tested on the analyzed case studies, it is conceived as a flexible interpretive tool to support the design, implementation, and evaluation of processes oriented toward the co-creation of shared heritage management, adaptable to the complexities of different contexts. The framework developed in this study proposes understanding community archaeology not merely as an intuitive "good practice," but as a methodologically assessable process grounded in systematically collected empirical data. Its aim is to guide projects towards "relational sustainability"—understood in its educational, cultural, social, and economic dimensions—among the actors involved, extending beyond the temporal boundaries of seasonal excavation.