It’s a small world, after all: building community through heritage, preservation, and education at Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park

Now more than ever, archaeologists recognize their research and interpretations are influenced by, practiced amid, and have an impact on the world and communities around them. There is no way for scholars or their work to remain separate from the social, political, and environmental landscape that surrounds them. Their work is linked within an entangled meshwork of complex ideologies relating to the systems and communities within which they operate. Faced with escalations in social and political tensions, inflammatory rhetoric, shifting policies, and other divisional techniques, the tool kits afforded by community-based and heart-centric practices in archaeology give a way to understand the communities with and within which archaeologists work and ways to forge new communities of support. This article illustrates such work at Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park in Arkansas, emphasizing archaeologist’ need to use these perspectives to craft a space for reciprocity, care, and mutual respect with their shared interest in the past.