Municipal authorities are required to appoint a professional consultant to accompany any planning procedures. A new approach, which has become popular in the last 20 years in western countries (though Israel is still in its first stages), has been to involve the community, thus providing added value to the municipal project. Community archaeology has turned things around - while until recently archaeology’s purpose had been to serve the site and the researcher, with other issues serving as only a means to this end, the community approach maintains that the site and researcher should be secondary and the goal should be the benefit to the community. Adopting a site or sites within the community can become a crucial tool in empowering the community, by enhancing individuals' awareness of their surroundings, encouraging them to take responsibility for the environment, arousing curiosity as to the settlement’s past, and eventually instilling a sense of identification and pride in their place of residence. Community archaeology has proved especially successful within communities made up of different groups that had previously shown limited cooperation.

As pioneers in this field, we can help authorities develop communal archaeology and use it to pool resources for the benefit of the community and the municipality.