Every year hundreds of talks and presentations are given around the world on archaeology yet how many people listen? Maybe a couple dozen and if you are lucky a few hundred. This is not because people are not interested, though some are not. It is because these talks are spread out over hundreds if not thousands of venues many miles apart or they are at times that are inconvenient for some to attend. It is just not possible to attend that many talks.
However, we have the technology to over come this problem, video and audio recording devices. A cheap audio recording device would cost $20-30 and a video camera $100-200. Of course there are many more expensive models that run into the thousands but money is no real cost to capturing these presentations. They can be placed on a website, some for free like YouTube and anyone in the world can see them. You can double, triple, 5x, 10x, or even 100x the size of your audience. I don’t think archaeology talks will ever go viral and get millions of hits but you really can expand your reach for what might take an extra five minutes of your time.
The Royal Commission of Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland is a good example of an organization that is looking to expand their reach. They post pod-casts of their Wednesday lunchtime lectures online.
http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/rcahms-lunchtime-lectures.html
I think if more people did this archaeology would have a greater impact on the public because they can access the knowledge.
