Elgidius E.B. Ichumbaki and Thomas Biginagwa

Abstract
Many of the heritage sites that researchers work on are reported to them by local people. Sometimes local people spend their meagre resources to protect such sites before researchers and heritage practitioners know about and visit them. Despite these roles, their skillsets and knowledge about the sites, including materials therein, are often ignored. A few researchers who value the contributions of local people, give them temporary, casual jobs, mostly related to camp management. Our talk will draw upon examples from southern Tanzania to illustrate strategies to incorporate local experts into research enterprises. We will also discuss integrating and balancing what local people know with what researchers learn from those sites to co-produce well-balanced knowledge. We contend that integrating local people’s interpretation of the sites and materials therein in our research outcomes is as important as conducting research at those sites.
Eventbrite event link:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/manage/collections/1287499/events

Biography
Elgidius E.B. Ichumbaki is President of the Pan African Archaeological Association (PAA), a not-for-profit professional society whose members are archaeologists and heritage professionals from across the world but working in Africa. Dr Ichumbaki is based in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam where he works as a Senior Lecturer. He is also affiliated with the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, as an Associate Professor. The research focus of Dr Ichumbaki, as Editor of the Journal of Heritage and Society, includes community archaeology, public history, and the decolonisation of research practice and data interpretations.

Thomas John Biginagwa is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam. He received his Ph.D. from the University of York, UK, in 2012. His thesis, supervised by Professors Paul Lane and Terry O’Connor, examined the animal economies practised by local communities against the context of the nineteenth-century caravan trade expansion in the Lower Pangani River Basin, north-eastern Tanzania. Biginagwa’s principal research interests lie in historical ecology, exploring human-environmental interactions, trade and exchange for the last two millennia.