A Brief Detour into Historical Context

I draw the following examples from the Old D’Hanis Archaeological Mapping Project and Castro Colonies Oral History Project, which explored the ways that place-making emerged in the wake of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Alsatian, German, and Mexican migration to Medina County, Texas (Markert Reference Markert2020, Reference Markert, White and Dale2022a, Reference Markert2022b). Medina County is located on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Ndé Kónitsąąíí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache). It is a settler-colonial landscape, divided, mapped, and settled through the Republic of Texas’s adoption of New Spain and Mexico’s empresario system, which offered land grants to colonization companies in exchange for settlement (Weaver Reference Weaver2005). D’Hanis was one of four German and Alsatian colonies founded in the 1840s by empresario Henry Castro on the land west of San Antonio (Jordan Reference Jordan1966; Morgenthaler Reference Morgenthaler2009; Van Dyke Reference Van Dyke2017; Waugh Reference Waugh1934; Weaver Reference Weaver2005). The presence of the towns was strategic, enabling the Republic of Texas to populate and secure territory west of its growing cities against incursion from Mexico while advancing a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Lipan Apache and the Comanche Nation (Ayres Reference Ayres1995; Babcock Reference Babcock2016; Campbell Reference Campbell2003; Panich and Schneider Reference Panich and Schneider2014). The contracts specifically stipulated the recruitment of white European colonists (Cohen Reference Cohen1897).

D’Hanis was the last and farthest west of Castro’s colonies. Alsatian and German settlers built rock houses and a Catholic church there, and their descendants spoke a dialect of Alsatian until World War II (Roesch Reference Roesch2012). After the construction of the railroad in 1881, many families relocated a mile and a half to New D’Hanis, which developed around the depot. The rock homes of the old settlement were later rented and purchased by Mexican migrants fleeing the Mexican Revolution; they encountered social, ethnic, and linguistic segregation in early twentieth-century Texas (De León Reference De León1985; De León and Stewart Reference De León and Stewart1983; Montejano Reference Montejano1987).

Within this landscape, the research emerged as a multifaceted and interdisciplinary process. My initial questions focused on the nineteenth-century Alsatian past before expanding to encompass the town’s more layered histories, and I drew on new methods as relationships and circumstance prompted me to think outside the frameworks I was familiar with. Eventually, I defended and published a dissertation. To understand project trajectories, we often take a big-picture approach, but in the following sections, I examine how research directions change during smaller moments, interactions, or experiences in the field.

From Oral History to Narrative Analysis

In August 2018, I met a 93-year-old resident of D’Hanis at the local Dairy Queen. We sat at the table where she would eat lunch each day and discussed my work and her experiences while eating fish sandwiches. Past and present converged over fast food and ice cream. She asked whether I had time to take a drive, and I told her I did. We finished eating and went to my rental car. From there, we drove to the nearby Hondo Airfield where she had worked as a teenager during World War II, a period when speaking German or Alsatian in public was prohibited. The car’s air conditioner ran at full blast while she spoke, a necessary annoyance given the heat. In the car, listening to her above the hum, I began to consider the ways that World War II had profoundly shaped landscape and identity in the community.

That same month, I interviewed one of the last fluent speakers of the Texas-Alsatian dialect. Born and raised on a farm outside Castroville, he did not learn English until he attended elementary school in town. He and others told me how Alsatian-speaking Texans would refer to outsiders from San Antonio as Amerikaners well into the twentieth century. As an adult, he had become somewhat of a celebrity in Alsace and traveled there regularly. With my tape recorder in hand, we sat in his pickup truck as he played me a CD he had recorded with a country and western band in France, translating classic country songs into Alsatian. I began to consider the ways in which language was inseparable from understanding space, history, and identity in this place.

Days later, I found myself in another pickup truck with a Mexican American resident of D’Hanis who took me to visit the house where he had lived as a child with his grandparents. It was now in ruins. His grandfather had escaped the Mexican Revolution and arrived in D’Hanis in the early twentieth century during a time when the town was deeply segregated, with a Spanish-speaking and English-speaking church and school. He purchased the rock house in the 1940s, which had been built nearly a century earlier by an Alsatian migrant. In a separate interview, his sibling reflected on living in that house and shared stories about how speaking Spanish was punished in school well after desegregation in the 1950s. When the archaeological crew later recorded the rock structure, these stories layered across the built landscape, and I began to consider what that might mean for analyzing and presenting our findings.

These are three examples of how oral history encounters prompted shifts in project questions and approaches. Conducting oral histories was an early part of the research design for the project.Footnote ² Based on my previous oral history experience (Barton and Markert Reference Barton and Markert2012), I was prepared to conduct interviews in a variety of settings, recognizing that the traditional sit-down interview, although preferable for sound quality, was not always possible in the field. Often, I talked with people in cars and trucks. After an initial informed consent process, I would keep my recorder handy in whatever setting I was in, following the lead of my interviewees. Sometimes interviews would unfold over multiple sessions and in a variety of settings as we picked up threads from previous conversations.

The nature of oral histories is emergent, so although this did not constitute a shift in methods, the conversations began to shape the way I approached other parts of the project, such as my analysis of archaeological landscapes (i.e., ruins) and the ways I approached multiple migrations in my research question. Understanding the multilayered conversations we were having about place and history demanded interdisciplinary analyses. Drawing from prompts during my coursework in the four subfields, I turned to linguistic anthropology methods to make sense of the ways people narrated these landscapes, their migration histories, and language through time.

Oral history encompasses both method and data (Abrams Reference Abrams2010). As a method, it decenters the archaeologist as the sole producer of knowledge (McDavid Reference McDavid2002); creates opportunities for ongoing dialogue between the archaeologist and community (Beck and Somerville Reference Beck and Somerville2005); creates space for the co-production of knowledge that challenges erasure and contested heritage narratives (ike Reference ike2024; Reid Reference Reid2022); positions archaeological sites as sites of memory (Moshenska Reference Moshenska2007); and highlights archaeological work as a situated, meaningful, and political project (González-Tennant Reference González-Tennant2014). As an anticolonial methodology, oral history can create space for community-driven dialogues that recenter narratives away from the colonial frameworks that forefront violence and toward generative frameworks rooted in experience and hope-based resistance (Montgomery Reference Montgomery2023). In the world of community-based and collaborative archaeology, oral history is a tool for making archaeology relevant, accountable, and dialogic in both practice and interpretation.

As data, oral histories function as sources of narrated information that can contribute to more holistic interpretations of the past. Abrams (Reference Abrams2010) provides several critical lenses through which we might make sense of oral historical data: as performance, memory, and co-created document, among others. As an archaeologist, I wanted to treat the oral histories I collected with the same systematic consideration as the archaeological data. I also recognized that in my oral history work I was recording stories with descendants of European settler communities and Mexican migrants of the twentieth century. The contested histories we explored together involved themes of settler colonialism, Indigenous displacement, segregation, and notions of belonging. There is the risk of simply perpetuating settler narratives and mythologies without analytical care. This, and some of the unexpected provocations of the encounters discussed earlier, encouraged me to use narrative analysis to understand not just what people were saying but also how they were using language to create meaning, memory, and identity through storytelling (De Fina and Georgakopoulou Reference De Fina and Georgakopoulou2012; Perrino Reference Perrino2011, Reference Perrino, Fina and Georgakopoulou2015).

We recorded more than oral history interviews over the course of the project. After transcription, I coded them based on emergent themes. I then selected narratives, re-transcribed them based on linguistic conventions (Figure 2; De Fina Reference De Fina2011), and conducted narrative analyses to examine patterns in language, storytelling, and content to understand strategies that people were using to make and convey meaning about place, history, and migration. Some examples of patterns were interactional elements of the interview itself (Wortham Reference Wortham2000), the racialization of language (Rosa Reference Rosa2016), how narrators call on known and imagined “figures of personhood” (Koven Reference Koven, Fina and Georgakopoulou2015) or evoke other’s voices in their own storytelling (Wortham Reference Wortham2001), how they navigate notions of time and space (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1981; De Fina Reference De Fina2003; Dick Reference Dick2010; Perrino Reference Perrino, Fina and Georgakopoulou2015), and how they orient themselves and others in the world (Modan and Shuman Reference Modan and Shuman2011). These linguistic analyses informed how I analyzed both my archaeological and narrative data, prompting me to think about the ways people also draw on meaningful concepts in material interactions (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1981). They also helped me make sense of space and time in multigenerational processes of place-making, from settler-colonial mythologies to the spatialization and segregation of language (German, English, and Spanish; Markert Reference Markert2022b).

Figure 2. Linguistic anthropology transcription conventions (adapted from De Fina Reference De Fina2011) and an example of an oral history excerpt, re-transcribed for narrative analysis as part of the Castro Colonies Oral History Project (Patricia G. Markert, 2022).

I sent the final product—the published dissertation—to people I interviewed and included in the analysis, some of whom have (self-reportedly) now read my full dissertation. Some have even given me paginated notes. This serves as a reminder that data collection and publication are mere moments in a broader conversation that is the co-production of knowledge within communities. Oral history also reminds us of this broader conversation: despite scholarly efforts to diligently record, transcribe, publish, and set things on paper, oral narratives continue to exist in a more dynamic sphere of relationships and dialogue. We enter this sphere when we work with communities. It provides necessary perspective to the work that we do.

Into the Community Archive(s)

In 2017, in the parking lot of a public library, I met a local resident who would later become a regular partner in historical research. From the back of his pickup truck, he pulled out a box filled with stacks of old papers—old letters and correspondence, receipts, ledgers, jail records—all from around the 1890s. He told me that as a child, he had saved these papers when one of the old buildings in D’Hanis was demolished in the 1950s. He also had a binder of hundreds of photographs that he had accumulated over the years by visiting other community members and scanning their images. This was my first introduction to a community culture of archiving in Medina County, a practice that was rooted deeply in place, history, and relationships. He allowed me to take the box into the library and create digital records for my own growing collection of materials. This experience repeated itself often throughout the next several years, and I came to realize that the process of archiving was itself an act of community building and place-making (Bastian and Flinn Reference Bastian and Flinn2019; Flinn Reference Flinn2007; Flinn et al. Reference Flinn, Stevens and Shepherd2009).

Archival research is a core component of historical archaeology, and archaeologists have incorporated archival materials into projects in creative and interdisciplinary ways (Beaudry Reference Beaudry1988; Flewellen Reference Flewellen2020; Norton Reference Norton2020; Platt Reference Platt2020; see also ike [Reference ike2024] and Alicia Odewale and Parker VanValkenburgh’s Mapping Historical Trauma in Tulsa (MHTT) from 1921–2021 Project). I originally approached archival research as background research, working with established archives like the Portal to Texas History (University of North Texas Libraries) and University of Texas San Antonio’s (UTSA) Special Collections to piece together historical context for the projects. I expected I would encounter primary source materials like photographs in people’s homes, but as I developed relationships in the community, scanning personal archives emerged as its own form of fieldwork.

At nearly every house that I visited, someone had some form of historical documentation that they retrieved for me to digitize. In response, I developed an on-the-go digitization method to quickly scan materials, which consisted of an iPad Pro, a scanning application (iScanner), a portable arm to hold the tablet parallel to the table, a foldable LED light, and a piece of black poster board. I scanned boxes of old newspapers and photographs, arrest records and store ledgers, letters that had been translated from German, personal collections, and scrapbooks. Sometimes, as in this section’s opening anecdote, the archive traveled to me. I recorded materials in restaurants and coffee shops. I also digitized physical materials in businesses—maps and plats at local surveyors’ offices—and institutional archives, such as folders of newspaper clippings and photographs at the Institute of Texan Cultures at UTSA. Not all these were primary source materials. Folks shared copies of local histories, pamphlets, and published materials (e.g., Jack Finger’s sell-published 2012 book, A Walking Tour of Beautiful Downtown D’Hanis . . . With Detours), and I scanned these as well. By 2019, I had amassed more than 3,500 digital images, including photographs, maps, letters, self-published family histories, newspaper clippings, and albums (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Nearly 4,000 digital scans from community-based archival research, taken using an iPad Pro and compiled/organized by date in the Apple photos app (Patricia G. Markert, 2021).

At the beginning of the project, I underestimated the sheer amount of archival material that community members would share with me during our work together. The items I scanned for my own research were a mere sample of a much larger, ever-evolving community archive. Through my own process of creating a digital archive, I began to recognize how relationships, movement, and trust factored into the ways that people navigated archival research and shared materials in community. I was being invited into spaces of archival expertise and allowed access to personal decisions and collections. Importantly, this archival network existed long before I arrived, and my presence became yet another part of that living archive.

My methods for digitizing archival records, as it turned out, also produced a way to visualize the day-to-day interactions on which community-based research is built. When I sat down to sort through the material, I realized that the iPad had an added feature—it geolocated each scan—allowing me to map an entire two years of archival research onto the landscape using ArcGIS (Figure 4). Given that the archive reflected direct work with community partners, it became a manifestation of the relationships and movements needed to participate in this practice of community archiving. It may not have produced a roadmap, but it reflected the routes and places we occupied together during the research process. It also opened up possibilities for further analysis, including an examination of the ways that archival materials repeat across this landscape (e.g., representing shared materials) or present gaps, fissures, and erasures in community and history (Flewellen Reference Flewellen2020; Hartman Reference Hartman2008), such as the division between Mexican and Alsatian-German representation in the materials, a present-day reflection of the segregated landscape under Jim Crow and its legacies.

Figure 4. Heat map generated in ArcGIS Online by inputting the geotagged locations of digital archival scans taken using an iPad Pro during fieldwork (Patricia G. Markert, 2021).

The nature of the community archive is similar to that of the oral histories: it exists in and through relationships, in a state of constant flux, and is fluid where my recording and publishing practices attempted to make it concrete. My research archive is part of a broader practice of collecting that continues in the community, and understanding it as such prompted me to think about archival materials—and the histories and identities inherent to those practices of collecting—in ways I might not have otherwise.

Close-Range Photogrammetry: Ruins as Sites of Digital Engagement

When it came time to record the ruins of Old D’Hanis, my team and I arrived with notebooks, iPads, hard hats, hedge clippers, and a chainsaw. The archaeological component of the research took place in November and December 2018, building on a year of preparation and community-based exploratory work. With the launch of the Old D’Hanis Archaeological Mapping Project, we set out to record six structures that dated to the early decades (1847–1860) of the Old D’Hanis settlement: five rubble-rock ruins and one log dogtrot cabin.Footnote ³

The goal of the archaeology was to record and map the structures and their locations using a range of methods, from architectural elevation drawing to geographic information systems (GIS). This contributed to an analysis of architectural and spatial decisions made by Alsatian and German migrants in the early decades of the settlement. After more than a year of community conversation, I was also interested in the decisions and place-making practices of later occupants who shaped the buildings, including generations of descendants and Mexican families who made the old rock houses their homes in the early twentieth century. As we cleared the structures (Figure 5) and then drew and photographed them, we were attentive to the biographies of the buildings themselves: a change in building material, an addition or expansion, evidence of remodeling, or the (occasional) inclusion of modern amenities like plumbing or electricity. The crew conducted surface survey, mapped areas of the structure by hand, photographed surface finds and architectural details using a project iPad, and completed scaled elevation drawings of walls and significant architectural features such as fireplaces (Figure 6).

Figure 5. Photographs of one of the ruins recorded by the Old D’Hanis Archaeological Mapping Project, before and after the crew cleared overgrowth (Patricia G. Markert, 2018).

Figure 6. Architectural elevation drawing of one of the ruins recorded by the Old D’Hanis Archaeological Mapping Project (Patricia G. Markert, 2018).

After clearing, we photographed the extant walls and surrounding landscape to create 3D models of the structures.Footnote ⁴ A month or so before heading to the field in 2018, I had learned about close-range photogrammetry as an archaeological field method and decided to add it to the project. This choice ended up shaping the project in significant ways. At the time, photogrammetry was emerging as an accessible, fast, and low-cost method for imaging sites, buildings, objects, and landscapes with a high level of accuracy and precision (Prentiss Reference Prentiss2016; Sapirstein Reference Sapirstein2016; Sapirstein and Murray Reference Sapirstein and Murray2017; Yamafune et al. Reference Yamafune, Torres and Castro2017; Yilmaz et al. Reference Yilmaz, M. Yakar and Dulgerler2007). Close-range photogrammetry generally consists of photos taken by hand. Although many projects use drones to capture photographs, which provides an exciting set of possibilities, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are not always the most accessible or cost-effective option, and trees and brush would have made their use difficult at several of the ruins we recorded. Although time and effort are trade-offs, close-range photogrammetry provides a layer of relative accessibility to the 3D modeling of architectural features. It is possible to implement this method with a DSLR camera, a laptop with a graphics processer, and photogrammetry software such as Agisoft Metashape Pro.Footnote ⁵ I included photogrammetry as a method late in the research design process in part because I was curious—would it work?—but also based on a strong sense that the 3D models would enable important types of engagement for the research and in community.

The models made a range of analytic options available to me digitally: creating scaled plan views of the structures in Adobe Illustrator (Figure 7), setting scales and measuring between points, and zooming in and out to reassess structural details. But beyond the research, the models became new sites for community connections and knowledge sharing. This builds on an emerging body of literature on digital, multimodal, reflective, interdisciplinary, and community-based approaches to mapping and GIS in archaeology (De Nardi Reference De Nardi2014; Gillings et al. Reference Gillings, Hacıgüzeller and Lock2019; González-Tennant Reference González-Tennant2016; Norton Reference Norton2020; Platt Reference Platt2020; Warner-Smith Reference Warner-Smith2020; see also Bodenhamer et al. [Reference Bodenhamer, Corrigan and Harris2015] for perspectives from the digital humanities).

Figure 7. Digital plan view created in Adobe Illustrator using scaled 3D model generated in Agisoft MetaShape Pro (Patricia G. Markert, 2021).

Many of the sites we recorded remain inaccessible for several reasons—safety, private property, or difficult terrain—so the models became an important point of access. Although we conducted site visits and tours during fieldwork, many of the people I worked with were in their eighties and older. Visiting a ruin, which could require some hiking and climbing over tricky terrain, was simply not possible. During and after fieldwork, I was able to bring preliminary models to people’s homes or to community events, allowing us to compare old photographs and discuss our observations of the ruins (Figure 8). The ruins were sites of memory and nostalgia, often with direct familial connections, so the ability to view and explore them virtually was a valuable option for those with limited access and mobility.

Figure 8. Nineteenth-century photograph of one of the structures recorded by the Old D’Hanis Archaeological Mapping Project alongside the 3D model of the ruin, generated using Agisoft Metashape Pro (photograph courtesy of E. Rothe; 3D model by Patricia G. Markert, Reference Markert2020).

The models also became, and remain, sites for remote engagement. In 2020, sitting in an apartment in Eugene, Oregon, during the early months of the COVID pandemic and with the thick smoke of the wildfires outside my window, I presented the 3D models to community members at a Castro Colonies Heritage Association meeting on Zoom. We were able to look closely together at architectural details despite the thousand-mile distance. Later, in 2025, I sent files from a more recent model I had made of St. Dominic’s Church (this time using a DJI Mavic 3E drone) to community partners in Texas from my home in London, Ontario. They 3D printed the model, adding structural elements as part of a local effort to stabilize the ruin. In 2018, we could not have envisioned either scenario, but the process of photogrammetry had enabled a continued conversation around the archaeology that transcended time, space, and circumstance.

Layered Pasts and Emergent Interdisciplinarity

During archaeological fieldwork in 2018, a crew member and I conducted a driving tour of D’Hanis with a then 99-year-old member of the community, someone who became a good friend over the course of the project and has since passed away. At her prompting, we slowed at the ruins but stayed in the car, glimpsing them through the sparse brush. A few buildings were visible for the first time in recent memory due to the clearing efforts of the crew.

Stopping at one structure, which was little more than a few standing walls, she told us, “This was a beautiful house. Oh, I loved this house.” We talked about her memory of the building, its L-shape and brick patio that was now barely visible under a thin layer of soil. She reminisced about the woman who had lived there, a rather severe aunt whom she remembered walking to town in her black dress each day. Others in the car, members of a younger generation, talked about playing in the ruins of the house and being chastised by their parents. The archaeological crew had just finished recording the site, so drawings, architectural details, and surface finds were fresh in our minds. Several different engagements with place mingled in the car as the ruin sat silently in our view. I was reminded of an earlier driving tour with another local resident and friend, a member of D’Hanis’s Mexican American community, and his memories of the solid walls of his childhood, now a ruin.

What these moments demonstrate is that although I am separating methods in this discussion, they and the data they produced were inseparable in practice. One final methodological challenge that emerged was how to engage with the wide range of interdisciplinary data collected during the project. How do we present multifaceted data in a way that reflects the process of its creation—the way that community-based work prompts us toward interdisciplinary research? I reflect on this briefly, acknowledging that the answer to this question is a long-term one that is still in progress.

These landscapes of memory are not visible in the ruins we recorded, but they became legible through these engagements with people and place. When I wrote the architectural analyses for the buildings after three years of community-based fieldwork, the result was an interdisciplinary layering of data: oral histories like these alongside archival fragments, drawings, and models of the ruins themselves. Learning to thoughtfully layer interdisciplinary data was yet another method that community-based work made necessary. Data drawn across methods create new conversations and insights, allowing us to think about places and people’s engagements with them across time and space. In my dissertation—the first publication of these results—the layering of data created multigenerational biographies of the buildings and their residents. They traced the histories of the structures across multiple periods of occupation, use, and abandonment, examining the different meaningful engagements that families and communities formed with the buildings through time, across both Alsatian-German and Mexican migration to D’Hanis.

We are continuing to experiment with interdisciplinary applications six years later. In June 2024, with a team of students from Western University, we traveled to Medina County to present the initial version of a virtual archaeology game called Discover Old D’Hanis. This game layers the reconstructed landscape of D’Hanis (ca. 1880) with 3D models, artistic reconstructions, archival data, archaeological notes and photographs, and excerpts from oral histories from German, Alsatian, and Mexican descendants. Players can walk through the town, discovering data points and piecing together a story of the place, its history, and its community through time. The student team comprised two fourth-year computer sciences students, who designed the virtual world and gameplay, and a master’s student in music, who contributed historic sound design and an original composition based on German folk music.

Nearly 100 community members—many familiar faces and many new ones—attended the event. In an astonishing, entirely unprompted moment, members of the older generation in the crowd began to sign a German folksong as the music student presented the songs that inspired her work (Fohn Reference Fohn2024). This new arm of the project is a work in progress, but it illustrates how new applications and research directions continue to emerge through ongoing conversations with students and community members.

Challenges and Opportunities for Community-Based Archaeology

Working with others is challenging work because relationships are challenging work. An archaeology rooted in relationships has the potential to challenge, unsettle, and change us (Kelvin and Hodgetts Reference Kelvin and Hodgetts2020; Lyons and Supernant Reference Lyons, Supernant, Supernant, Baxter, Lyons and Atalay2020:10; see also Rizvi Reference Rizvi, Supernant, Baxter, Lyons and Atalay2020). The relationships through which we build community-based projects, like any relationship, are understandings between people. In whatever capacity, we are sharing our lives and something of ourselves with others. It is a matter of trust as much as ethics, and it is a two-way-street.

The positions we occupy as researchers require an ongoing commitment to transparency, humility, accountability, and an openness to change and new direction (see Westmont and Clay Reference Westmont and Clay2021). At the same time, centering community requires recognition that our titles and resources are hollow without welcome and access from those with (and for) whom we work. Outside academic or professional frameworks, sharing power and building trust may not resemble traditional methods like meetings or discussions. They might look like sharing a meal, accepting an invitation, taking a car ride, attending a funeral, or getting to know each other’s toddlers and grandchildren as years pass. My daughter has now joined me in Texas three years in a row. She has spent time at people’s homes and at community events, ridden in trucks on ranches, and fed sheep that graze the ruins of Old D’Hanis (Figure 9). Many of my long-term community partners have watched her grow, and she knows their names. I have been privileged to have her join me, though managing childcare alongside project and community commitments has taken considerable work (Reference Seifert and Spencer-Wood2025). Her presence has become an indelible part of the fabric of the project.

Figure 9. My daughter and I at the children’s archaeology exhibit I designed for the Castro Colonies Living History Center, Castroville, Texas, taken two years apart (photos taken by Jeremy Trombley, August 2023 and June 2025).

One challenge here—in addition to doing archaeology as a parent (Camp Reference Camp, Muhammad and Neuilly2019)—is nurturing relationships beyond the bounds of a research project. Doing so can be wonderful and generative, but our ability to build long-term relationships as archaeologists, and often as outsiders, may not always match our willingness or desire. Constraints like time, funding, graduate degree timelines, travel, family, and the demands of new research projects exist for everyone in different variations and capacities, and they too change over time (Rizvi Reference Rizvi, Supernant, Baxter, Lyons and Atalay2020). There is no easy answer or one-size-fits-all solution, except for a commitment to dialogue and transparency, a respect for the very real work of building relationships, and an awareness of our limitations.

It is also important to recognize that it is often, if not always, a privilege to engage in community-based research as an academic. A roadmap to community-based practice does not exist because we, as researchers in community, occupy different identities, bodies, and social privileges that shape the way we move through the world with others, as well as our own experiences of safety and access. The research methods I describe here are situated and contextualized by my presentation as a white, able-bodied, cisgender woman in South Texas. As a researcher, I can confront issues of racialization, segregation, and settler colonialism from a place of relative safety, if not without some discomfort. Many places in the United States, including the state of Texas and farther afield, are taking strategic legislative, political, and policy-based actions to exclude and harm BIPOC, LGBTQAI2S+, and immigrant members of their communities, as well as archaeologists or students seeking to do this type of work. Indeed, fieldwork and professional settings writ large can still be unsafe spaces for many archaeologists, particularly minoritized members of the discipline (e.g., Hodgetts et al. Reference Hodgetts, Supernant, Lyons and Welch2020; Markert et al. Reference Markert, Hodgetts, Cantin, Mallet Gauthier, Lyons, Supernant, Welch, Wiley and Dent2025; Meyers et al. Reference Meyers, Horton, Boudreaux, Carmody, Wright and Dekle2018; Voss Reference Voss2021a). This raises ethical issues for community-based archaeology that we must collectively address in our politics and professions (D’Alpoim Guedes et al. Reference D’Alpoim Guedes, Gonzalez and Rivera-Collazo2021; Franklin et al. Reference Franklin, Dunnavant, Flewellen and Odewale2020; ike et al. Reference ike, Miller and Hartemann2020; Voss Reference Voss2021b).

Collaborative approaches are time-consuming and expensive; even when we get creative, field research costs money and relationship building takes time. I was fortunate to receive funding to do this work from both local and national sources, all of which expressed support for community-based approaches. Financial barriers already pose steep obstacles to entering and succeeding in archaeology (Heath-Stout and Hannigan Reference Heath-Stout and Hannigan2020). Engagements with community, collective project planning, public-facing outputs, and maintaining relationships can mean slower routes to publication and other traditional milestones on the tenure track. The professional landscape is changing slowly, but community-based work remains challenging to fund (Montgomery and Fryer Reference Fryer2023), even though targeted funds like the Wenner-Gren Engaged Anthropology Grant offer opportunities that did not exist a decade ago.

Concluding Thoughts for Paths Forward

As Natasha Lyons and Kisha Supernant write in their introduction to Archaeologies of the Heart (Reference Lyons, Supernant, Supernant, Baxter, Lyons and Atalay2020:10), “Without the relationships we build, archaeology would not be possible, yet we do not always appreciate the impacts those relations have on the ways knowledge gets generated in our field and the ways we interpret the past.” When I started this project, I had a research design: I sought to compare two nineteenth-century towns using a set of methods that seemed appropriate to the task: oral history, archaeological survey and mapping, and some archival research. On paper, it is easy to check the boxes: I used those methods, these were the limitations, these were the results. But what I had not quite anticipated was the power of relationships and the ways they prompted me in new creative directions throughout the process. The dissertation I wrote four years later reflected a shared exploration of space, archives, ruins, and stories that exceeded the bounds of what I alone would have thought possible when I arrived at Holy Cross Church in 2017. Rather than engaging with a single migration event, it reflected the many intersecting migrations that shaped the area (Markert Reference Markert2020), its (often contested) heritage, and the vibrancy of its communities.

Being able to develop, communicate, and execute a research design is a necessary skill in archaeology, one I now have the privilege of teaching graduate students in my classes. In teaching and mentoring, we can also take care to orient students to the flexible and relational realities of fieldwork with communities. Methods may change. Projects will change. The product may not be what we envisioned, but it will reflect the relationships we developed along the way, and those relationships and experiences have the potential to shape the project as much as (if not, at times, more than) our initial conceptions.

This article has been an exploration in charting the ways that methods emerge in conversation with community and how relationships lead us in new directions as we move through the research process. It has also been a practice in narrating the small moments and interactions that shape projects and their methods. There is no roadmap for community-based research, but there is the work of building and navigating relationships and of being open to the occasionally unexpected directions that research can take when we work with others. In hindsight, walking into the church at the start of this project was a practice in confronting the unknown and a lesson in letting go. It may not have been outlined in my research design, but the act of showing up and being present—that day in 2017, and all the times that came after—became one of the most critical and necessary methods for building a community-based project. When we locate ourselves in community, we follow each other’s lead.