Many Publics, Many Pasts: Archaeological Sites, Identity, and Heritage Tourism (original) (raw)

Participation in a world of meaning associated with historic places creates a relationship to the past that apparently transcends modern categories of shared heritage and identity such as of Anglo, Hispanic, and Indian, with their specific and particular pasts. The meaning that visitors find in ruins also challenges our conception of time, which neither proceeds smoothly from past to present to future, nor cycles through seasons and generations. Many people experience the ruins as both and simultaneously past and present, a place where landscape, buildings, things, and people from all times live in each visitor’s experience, a “collection of pasts” in the here- and-now.