Community, Public Archaeology, and Co-construction of Knowledge Through the Educational Project of a Rural Mountain School

1 Introduction

In this article, we present the experience of the LLABOR-LANDS research group, dedicated to the study of rural history in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The archaeological interventions developed by the group in the last 15 years – focused on understanding the genesis of the landscape in the Middle Ages – have fostered a context of reflection on the role that historical research should assume in the social environment in which it is developed. This reflection has been translated into the implementation of different knowledge transfer strategies, experimenting with approaches that allow for strong social involvement, beyond constructing well-documented historical accounts of certain sites or territories.

Therefore, it is necessary to present the context of our research: the rural mountain societies of the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, spaces that are suffering a deep population crisis, similar to that of other areas of Southern Europe. A crisis that began in the first decades of the twentieth century, then becoming from the sixties onwards, favouring a deep imbalance between urban and rural areas and generating a complex problem that in recent years, has crept into the political agendas of Spain: depopulation and the problems of the so-called emptied Spain (España vaciada) (Del Molino, 2016). Consequently, we are talking about a sparsely populated, aging area, that for years was a victim of developmentalist policies – especially during the Franco dictatorship – which favoured the exodus from the countryside to urban areas to supply the industrial centres with labour. This not only brought with it population loss but also led to the generation of pejorative discourses about the rural environment and the activities of the primary sector, leading to a major identity crisis, as well as a breakdown in the relationship of these populations with the territories from which they came from and an environmental crisis, in which political and social problems converge with the consequences of climate change.

In contrast to these policies consolidated in the twentieth century, the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen the development of new discourses that are aware of the social and environmental problems that the abandonment of large areas of Spanish territory represents, mainly the inland area – with the exception of Madrid – and the mountain areas. This is reflected in the policies designed by the Spanish State to reverse, or at least stop, depopulation, and in the European guidelines linked to the CAP, especially those programmes related to rural development.

We must therefore situate the activities of our research group in this specific political and social context. Within the framework of archaeological interventions and historical research, we have become aware of the need to implement networks of complicity with these rural societies immersed in complex processes of disarticulation, considering that historical research must play an active role. On the one hand, by generating new historical narratives that revalue the role of rural societies in the past, breaking with the great metahistorical narratives that have dominated the history of the spaces we investigate. On the one hand, by favouring innovative forms of management of rural heritage and rural landscape. This helped to modify the prejudicial discourses and generate new dynamics based on a deep knowledge of its history and heritage.

2 New Scientific Paradigms in the Construction of Knowledge – Towards a Greater Involvement of Communities and Their Heterogeneous Agents

The profound social transformations of recent decades – linked to globalization processes – have encouraged discussions about which educational models we should implement and that could be effective, given the conditions and needs of the new social context. In a globalized world, access to knowledge is achieved through multiple and diverse channels. The emergence of new media, especially social networks, has favoured the development of innovative forms of knowledge construction and contact with it and has contributed to transforming the role and identity of the agents involved in its generation, as well as their relationships and interconnections. The traditional educational model, linked to formal educational institutions, has been revised based on the practice of non-formal and informal teaching. These are ways of transmitting knowledge in which innovative criteria are taken into account: the individual’s control over learning, different processes of evaluating the acquisition of content, the degree of motivation, the activation of prior knowledge, the involvement of emotions in the educational process, or the search for awareness about what is being discussed (Asenjo et al., 2012) that dynamize our way of obtaining knowledge.

These changing processes related to teaching cannot be understood in isolation leaving apart the parallel reflection on the ways of generating knowledge. The traditional model of knowledge production is nourished by an empirical tradition that was imposed since the first scientific revolutions of modernity and in which, therefore, a very clear difference was established between science and scientific methods and the rest of knowledge and know-how. This model is articulated around a single scientific discipline, ignoring interdisciplinarity, and established around cognitive and social norms that determine which questions are relevant, which should be studied, and who participates in the process, all associated with particular interests of a community. The ability to determine what is good science and what does not meet the parameters is attributed to the university and research centres, both playing a hierarchical role (Gibbons et al., 1994, pp. 2–3).

Faced with this model of science, in recent decades, more reflection has emerged on the need to move towards new forms of knowledge production in which the hierarchical process is replaced by a more horizontal proposal, highlighting the heterogeneity of the agents involved and interdisciplinarity. Thus, the new model of science gives greater relevance and importance to an economic orientation not defining its objectives by the interests of the academic sphere but by the needs or specificities of a particular context of application. This new perspective must suppose a greater sensitivity of scientists and technicians towards social demands, while in the previous tradition they were linked to an aseptic and objectivist pretension that disconnected them from lived reality (Gibbons et al., 1994, pp. 4–7). This new way of understanding science has been enriched in recent years with reflections on very diverse topics that insist on the idea of constructing scientific knowledge as a social process: different degrees and types of relationship between science and society; the existence of a heterogeneous public that demands results from the entities and agents that produce knowledge from different spheres, such as politics and the market; a different form of communication in which society conditions what knowledge is produced; a role of experts oriented towards social needs; and a more robust type of knowledge based on the fact that “its validity rests on a broad community made up of producers, disseminators, merchants, and users of knowledge” (Jiménez-Buedo & Ramos-Vielba, 2009, p. 723). Without a doubt, it is a different way of understanding how science is done and the role it must play in society, but one that is not free of risk, depending on how it is applied, understood, and approached from the market and the institutions that generate it.

Thus, on many occasions, the new strategies drawn up from these new perspectives have been affected by the lack of funding and the pressure on universities and public bodies that has led to the commercialization of research activity, which ends up giving priority to the interests of the demand of companies, confusing them with the needs of society. In this way, the generation of critical and alternative thinking is left in the background, favouring a dominant situation that turns the product of research – which should be returned to society – into something that is channelled, in some cases, towards the interests of companies and, in others, towards journals and publishers with high publication costs that benefit private entities (Unceta Satrústegui et al., 2022). Consequently, economic and scientific elites seize benefits that should be passed on to society since, in most cases, they are financed with public funds.

The new model of science forces universities and their researchers to submit to increasing pressure to demonstrate their capacity to transfer the scientific knowledge they generate, in a scenario in which they try to ensure its profitability and adjustment to the demands of society. The budgetary crises that have affected public funding bodies in recent decades have been responsible for these new demands (Jiménez-Buedo & Ramos-Vielba, 2009, p. 721). This trend may have benefited certain types of research in the field of science and technology, but not the Humanities, disciplines in which it is more difficult to assess the immediate profitability of the knowledge generated due to the heterogeneity of forms of production and distribution of knowledge, which are not comparable with each other and cannot be compared to the way of producing knowledge in experimental sciences (Olmos-Peñuela et al., 2014).

On the other hand, as a link between this new conception of science and the teaching/learning processes, we must also reflect on the growing importance attributed to the transfer of knowledge in the university framework and on how this concept is defined. First, it is necessary to differentiate between the unidirectional “transmission of knowledge” in which the scientist adapts to the recipient and the “transfer of knowledge” where the objective is to ensure that the knowledge generated by research can be used by society and incorporated into its own processes, which requires adapting knowledge to the needs of the recipient (Castro Martínez et al., 2008, p. 629). This also implies developing complementary activities which, in the case of humanities, involves generating social innovation laboratories that allow the analysis, from new approaches, of a situation, the proposal of an improvement, or the resolution of a problem and that favour its adoption by institutions, organizations, or communities (Bouchard, 1999).

3 Knowledge Construction and Transfer in the Study of Rural Communities – Research and Proposals Through Public and Community Archaeology

All these advances in the way of generating and transmitting knowledge have a direct relationship with our field of study: local communities and the peasantry of the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula in the longue durée, with special attention to the Middle Ages. In the traditional model of science, local knowledge was not taken into account, and communities were not part of the processes of knowledge construction. However, in a context in which the rural world faces serious structural problems that call into question its survival – depopulation, changes in its economic bases, and modification in the way resources are managed – the focus has been placed on changing the relationship of science with these rural communities, favouring their incorporation as another agent in the generation of knowledge. It is necessary to focus attention on their social reality, needs, and demands, so that scientific knowledge can become an active tool that allows them to provide answers to their problems from a complex scientific approach.

The material conditions faced by these communities also have a direct effect on their identities, which have also been altered by their insertion into different national and supranational structures in the context of globalization; they have therefore witnessed the emergence of multiple and overlapping identities (Jonas, 2010), which imposes the need to implement a multi-scale approach in their analysis. Rural identities, previously characterized by a fairly high degree of historical persistence, have been subjected to very strong transformations influenced by issues such as migration and population exodus, the reception of new settlers from outside the communities, the problem of resource management, or changes in the form of governance.

With the aim of proposing new avenues of action, attention has been drawn to the need to revalue the agrobiological knowledge of these groups (Fernández Mier & Rebollar Flecha, 2022) and, therefore, to outline new forms of organization of the construction of knowledge that have a greater relationship with the new model of science defended. In this line of research, another intellectual proposal has also been incorporated, “the dialogue of knowledge,” that allows us to delve deeper into the complexity of studies on the rural environment, incorporating into the construction of knowledge the local knowledge accumulated by communities over millennia, knowledge based on traditional uses that have favoured biological diversity and sustainable management of the landscape, a relationship with nature very different from that developed by the Western society after the industrial revolution based on the domination of nature (Berry, 1999; Freire, 1990). This range of concerns has stimulated the activation of new lines of research within rural history (Fernández Mier, 2018; Fernández, 2023; Martín Civantos et al., 2021) with the aim of proposing alternatives and solutions.

The renewal of research topics has been accompanied by the development of new methodologies for approaching written and, above all, unwritten records, hand in hand with the rise of Medieval Archaeology and, more specifically, the lines of archaeological intervention related to local communities, such as the archaeology of inhabited spaces, of uninhabited areas, of the peasantry or agrarian archaeology (Kirchner, 2020). All these lines of work make it possible to obtain economic and environmental information on aspects related to the appropriation and conceptualization of the territory (Alonso González et al., 2018; Kirchner, 2010; Ruiz Ruiz & Martín Civantos, 2017), but they also cover other areas such as social dynamics and social complexity, micropolitics, internal differentiation, or even gender (Quirós Castillo, 2016).

Our research group has participated in the construction of these thematic lines with archaeological research and interventions carried out in two villages in the North of Iberian Peninsula: Vigaña (municipality of Belmonte de Miranda) and Villanueva de Santu Adrianu (Fernández Fernández & Fernández Mier, 2019; Fernández, 2023). The research has yielded qualitative and quantitative volumes of diachronic information, with records from Recent Prehistory to the present, something that has made it possible to make the understanding of the ways in which the territory has been used over time more complex.

Faced with the primacy of a model of science based on scientistic, empiricist, and objectivist criteria, at the service of social and academic elites and situated in a hierarchical position with respect to other forms of knowledge, our group has opted for a modality in connection with the community, which tries to satisfy social demands, including the different agents that compose the local fabric and exploring new forms of construction of historical knowledge, revaluing local knowledge: from agrobiological knowledge to community’s own worldviews.

From the beginning of our research proposal in this area, we have considered how to return to society the scientific results obtained with our research. These objectives are in line with the approaches of Public Archaeology, which has a long tradition in the Anglo-Saxon world, but which has had less impact in Spain. This line advocates that the community has an active role and participation in actions and decisions related to heritage: from analysis and research to conservation and dissemination initiatives (Cardona, 2012). Public archaeology has diversified, encompassing very diverse fields of action, from heritage management policies to education and ethnicity. Its functions are also very diverse: bringing archaeology and heritage closer to the community, improving its vision and generating a stronger bond, integrating the population into the processes of research and construction of knowledge, and taking advantage of oral records and popular interpretations in this process. It also contributes to deconstructing the dominant narratives issued from a privileged place of enunciation and, of course, allows the use of archaeological knowledge in education as a resource capable of transforming social conceptions about the past, generating stronger links between the population and its history, or using the archaeological method as a way of making scientific methodology visible in a broad way, being aware of the interdisciplinarity that characterizes Archaeology (Cardona, 2012, p. 502; Matsuda & Okamura, 2011, pp. 1–4).

The result of these initial approaches was materialized in different initiatives: organization of open days, guided tours or informative talks, or the first Talleres Didáuticos d’Arqueoloxía (Figure 1), annual meetings celebrated coinciding with group’s archaeological interventions. In these meetings, we organized different workshops encouraging the participation of the villagers in order to publicize our work, introduce the youngest members of the community to the archaeological method, bring them closer to history and heritage, and, at the same time, acting as a dynamic and cohesive element. This experience served to verify that the activities organized punctually, coinciding with our archaeological campaigns, were not enough: most of the attendees had some professional relationship with Archaeology or were tourists – mainly from an urban area – who demanded some type of cultural activity or were more accustomed to attending these meetings (Fernández Mier & López Gómez, 2022, p. 219). However, it was difficult to connect with local communities, which led us to reflect on the need to be active throughout the year, using different channels, including the local school (Fernández Mier et al., 2021, p. 39). Thus, we designed a knowledge transfer project in collaboration with the nearest rural educational centre in which we applied the theoretical and methodological approaches developed in the ethnoarchaeological workshops and in which we kept in mind the theoretical reflections on the new models of science, the changes in the forms of teaching, and the concept of knowledge transfer to which we referred in the first part of this work.

Figure 1

The 2023 edition of the Talleres Didáuticos d’Arqueoloxía. Author: Elías Carballido González.

The Belmonte de Miranda Public School is a rural educational centre that welcomes about 40 students (Figure 2). Their ages range from 3 to 11 years (preschool and primary education), with multi-level classrooms due to the small number of students. For years, the school has been committed to an STEAM interdisciplinary educational model that relied on projects based on the teaching of science, technology, arts, and mathematics that fostered both curricular contents and competences, attitudes and behaviors in which there is no compartmentalization of different disciplines (Peláez Álvarez & Fernández Mier, 2020). The proposal emphasized the approach to the natural environment and local heritage – fully integrating us into the school’s educational programming, therefore, through formal education – and was based on project-based learning, a modality that uses research as a form of learning and that poses questions and problems, offering solutions that stimulate the capacities and autonomy of students. In this project, the concept of co-construction of knowledge has been fundamental, involving not only students, teachers, and researchers but also other social actors who have collaborated in the activation and stimulation of actions that allowed students to construct new meanings; these actors ensured learning conditions that created a suitable scenario for experimentation, creativity, challenge, and, therefore, the development of the individual.

Figure 2

NW of the Iberian Peninsula: towns where the project was held and the main excavation site. Author: Elías Carballido González.

This learning methodology is the right tool to try to achieve our objectives, which had different orientations: on the one hand, to bring history, archaeology, and heritage closer to the child population, awakening scientific vocations and generating interest in local heritage, and on the other hand, in line with the needs of these rural territories and their problems, the objective was to integrate different local social and economic agents in the processes of co-construction of knowledge, revaluing local agrobiological knowledge, and creating networks of interconnection between the members of the community, especially between the older population – which treasures the information related to local knowledge – and the child and youth population, strengthening their identities through revitalization of the relationship with the territory in which they live.

4 The Project ConCiencia Histórica

The first edition of the project “ConCiencia Histórica: arqueología y comunidad en la Sociedad rural”^[1] coincided with the 2018–2019 academic year, with other editions taking place in successive years. Each one focused on a different historical or ethnographic theme: the first was dedicated to the study of the Belmonte Monastery, located near the place where the educational centre is located. The second focused on oral tradition and the third on water as a resource.

In 2018, it was decided to focus the project around the Monastery of Santa María de Belmonte. This monastery represented the main lordly power in the territory of Belmonte from its foundation at the end of the eleventh century until its confiscation in 1836, and even today, despite the fact that few architectural remains are preserved, it is a central element in the collective imagination of the inhabitants of this town. The monastery had territorial and jurisdictional dominion over an extensive territory located mainly in the valleys of Belmonte and Somiedo. The architectural complex of the monastery was practically destroyed after the confiscation, with many of its elements – columns, capitals, or ashlars – used in the construction of some buildings in Belmonte.

As a start, a motivational activity was held and involved the whole educational community: teachers, families, and students. That activity consisted of visiting one of the sites in which we had been working. In September 2018, we organized a visit to the site of El Cuernu (Figure 3), where a small megalithic monument rises at a height of 1,200 m above the sea level. This experience allowed a first approach to the archaeological works, both to the research methodology and the conditions in which these works are carried out, taking into account that these interventions take place in the high mountains and require specific buildings and materials. The location of this site led to the consideration of several topics of the educational programme: geographic and environmental topics, territorial limits, traditional architecture, or primary economic activities. In the projects developed in successive courses, this initial experience was repeated: in the project related to oral tradition, we visited an ethnographic complex in which one of the neighbours explained the uses associated with this mountain livestock area; and during the course in which the project on water as a resource was implemented, the initiation activity was linked to the Roman gold mining sites in the region.

Figure 3

Megalithic site of El Cuernu. Author: Margarita Fernández Mier.

Subsequently, throughout the course, various workshops were offered to introduce students to the scientific archaeological method. These were adapted to the requirements of the educational curriculum and encourage theoretical–practical dialogue. The first block addressed those techniques related to the treatment of archaeological materials: a physical anthropology workshop in which questions related to biology, health, and history are worked on, introducing students to the formulation of questions and seeking solutions based on exercises guided by teachers and researchers (Figure 4). With this workshop, students discovered the different methods used to differentiate variables such as sex, age, or pathologies that the individual had suffered and can participate in the treatment of the pieces. This information allowed students to draw conclusions related to life in the Middle Ages, from work to living conditions. Another of the workshops was dedicated to zooarchaeology (Figure 5), in which we used our reference collection to identify the different species that appeared in the archaeological record and the type of information it provided us: the size of the animal, work it had done, or the manner of death. Once again, it was a good opportunity to connect different subjects in the curriculum and to introduce them to the scientific method. We have also approached carpology, anthracology, or traceology as applied analytics in archaeology, counting on specialists in each of these techniques to carry out the workshops.

Figure 4

Zooarchaeology workshop.

Figure 5

Anthracology workshop.

Another group of workshops was focused on the introduction to new technologies, such as the use of free software Qlone for the creation of 3D models of archaeological pieces, especially ceramics (Figure 6). Through this activity, they also delved into issues such as the dissemination of heritage and the transfer of research to society. Another very interesting activity was related to the introduction to the study of renewable energies.

Figure 6

Showing students different techniques for the treatment and analysis of archaeological materials.

The third group of workshops was related to local ethnographic and cultural knowledge: modelling, turning and firing ceramics, making bread in the old oven, and traditional music. In these activities, we involved researchers as well as residents of the town’s senior centre, which allowed us to contribute to intergenerational dialogue and the integration of different social segments in our project. We also promoted the participation of some agents belonging to the local social and economic networks, such as the manager of a bakery, who involved the youngest children in everything related to making bread in a traditional way, using a certain cereal, escanda spelt, very widespread in the European Middle Ages, and whose cultivation was lost during the twentieth century, remaining in specific regions, one of which was our study area. We also had ceramic specialists who worked in a traditional pottery that is still in use today and whose pieces were documented in our archaeological interventions. Finally, we involved the medical sector, which collaborated in activities related to healthy habits and eating. Over the years, one of the workshops we have held on a recurring basis is that of traditional music, with the collaboration of the responsible for the Archivu de la Tradición Oral d’Ambás, in which all the residents actively participated.

In parallel with these workshop groups, different activities were designed that involved field work, for example, the registration of all the architectural elements from the monastery that are scattered around the town of Belmonte and that were reused in the buildings during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In order to catalogue the findings and make an inventory, the students created a registration form and used iPads to do so. The students also had the opportunity to work with written sources – by visiting the Historical Archive of Asturias to consult one of the most important documents in the monastic archive, the Libro Tumbo – and oral sources. The final activity of the project was an archaeological intervention in the place where the monastery was located, an activity that has been maintained throughout all the projects, since it is the one that most motivates the students (Figure 7). To date, several surveys have been carried out, which, while being an activity that is part of the educational project, are useful for the group’s scientific team to assess the archaeological potential of this site.

Figure 7

Excavating the monastic dependences. Author: Pablo López Gómez.

After the research work, the students processed the information obtained with the aim of constructing a historical narrative and the teaching resources that they would design for a final activity: a cultural fair in which they explained to the entire educational community the work carried out throughout the course, including a small exhibition showing the pieces recovered in the archaeological interventions. In addition, using the information collected in the inventory, the students designed a tourist route that pointed out the architectural remains of the monastery scattered around the town, called Las chalgas de los escolinos. The Belmonte de Miranda Local Council signposted the route and included it in the tourist itineraries of the municipality, a good example of a knowledge transfer action in which a network of relationships is tied between different actors involved in the management of the heritage and which generates a useful resource for the community and for any visitor who comes to the municipality.

The experience of developing the three projects shows the potential of the Humanities to generate social innovation initiatives with a strong implication in the context in which they are applied and which generate an important qualitative value through a whole series of contributions that go beyond what is measurable in economic terms (Walmsley, 2018). The generation of historical knowledge, the development of learning experiences, the improvement of social and educational skills, the cohesion generated through the network of contacts tied together in the realization of the projects, the collective commitment, the sense of identity, and the social awareness of the heritage values of territories that suffer the consequences of depopulation are undoubtedly contributions of a high social value that must contribute to laying the foundations for new proposals for the future of these local communities that allow us to alleviate the consequences of depopulation.

Within the framework of this proposal, we have begun to work on the design of interview models that allow us to measure the social impact of our activity, after several years of implementing the different transfer proposals. Given that these are complementary activities with different approaches, it is necessary to advance in the design of a methodology adapted to the specific characteristics of both the rural areas in which we work and the different objectives pursued with these proposals, which are aimed at different audiences. This is an ongoing investigation that we hope will provide us with qualitative information to advance in the redefinition of the value of the humanities in today’s society.

5 Conclusions

The research proposal on medieval local communities in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, initiated more than a decade ago with an interdisciplinary approach, has become more complex as our research team became aware of the current situation of these territories, their demands, and needs.

In the development of our research, we never lost the connection with the problems of this territory, nor did we forget the important role that historical research plays in its global understanding. Thus, our archaeological interventions have always been oriented towards understanding local communities in a complex and dense way. This connection with the territory and its problems promoted knowledge transfer projects with different approaches and orientations that responded to the demands of society, both those that social actors explicitly verbalize and those detected by us within the framework of the project and in which the generation of historical knowledge could play a relevant role. Thus, we turned the investigated territory into an observation/experimentation laboratory to implement proposals that allow us to test how the historical knowledge generated through proposals for the co-creation of knowledge can become an active, dynamic, and effective tool to design intervention actions on the territory that generate an important social value and that focus their attention on stimulating new generations by making them participate in historical research on their territory.

This research has been carried out within the framework of various research and transfer projects funded by local, regional, and national institutions. But it has a strong local vocation, it is based on a deep knowledge of local problems, and has been woven from the bottom-up, from local demands and problems to academic and political institutions, combining synergies based on strong local experience and giving prominence to social actors in the different activities implemented.

This proposal, rooted in the territory, gives a voice to local communities when it comes to identifying what they understand by heritage and revalues their knowledge as intangible heritage elements. We consider this to be the key to the success of this initiative: the communities recognize themselves in the project, they identify with it, and that becomes the best foundation to strengthen the proposal. Although this type of project has not caught on in the Iberian Peninsula, with activities in most cases limited to the mere transmission of information, it does converge with other proposals that have been implemented in territories with similar problems (Burgos et al., 2021; Comendador Rey, 2016; Martín Civantos et al., 2021; Walid Sbeinati et al., 2020), which undoubtedly lay the foundation for generating areas of discussion and reflection on the particularities that research committed to the problems of the territory must acquire.