Volunteer motivation in a CITiZAN community archaeology project at Sandwich Bay, Kent

Volunteer participation produces an invaluable wealth of support and data for the coastal and estuarine archaeology of the UK, which may otherwise go unrecorded, but what drives volunteers to conduct this work? Our paper aims to identify volunteer motivation for participating in fieldwork at Sandwich Bay, Kent, in February 2022, run by the Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network (CITiZAN). Adopting methods within rapid ethnographic assessment (REA), which uses semi-structured interviews and participant observation, demonstrates that reasons for volunteering are numerous and varied. These include experiences, social factors, fear of losing archaeological knowledge, learning, and health and wellbeing. By better understanding volunteer motivations, projects in community archaeology can be better placed to recruit and retain their volunteers, where REA is demonstrated as an effective method for gaining this information.