Many Publics, Many Pasts: Archaeological Sites, Identity, and Heritage Tourism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ideologies in Archaeology, edited by Reinhard Bernbeck and Randall H. McGuire, pages 107-129. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2011
With the rapid growth of the tourist industry, archaeology is being drawn into heritage tourism. Recent studies have examined the intersection of archaeology and tourism within globalization. The widely recognized potential of the partnership includes new funding sources as well as expanding popular support for archaeology. The two major demands of tourism on archaeology are access and relevance. For tourism, relevance focuses on meeting the demands of consumers, particularly those who want access to authentic or entertaining presentations. The notion of access is a positive demand, until one raises concern for the fragility of archaeological sites. Access and relevance raise an additional paradox of heritage tourism: engagement with a vague concept of public, a felt sense of what people are willing to see, reproduces assumptions about the past and of archaeology in society. Within the various definitions of archaeological heritage, the key concern falls to the present needs of consumers of the past. While the previous public archaeology sought to serve a generalized and vague future, today's engagements with heritage tourism are focused on the present. Similar to other work on the sociopolitics of archaeology, a critical examination of the shifts in public archaeology allows illumination of the implications of archaeological actions within the parameters influenced by the new discourse. Two studies from Florida are used to problematize the notion of public, with consequences compared in global perspective.
Can Heritage Tourism Save the Past? Archaeology, Aesthetics, and the
A critique of the tendency of antiquities collectors and museums, abetted even by otherwise progressive contemporary artists like Ai Weiwei, to reduce the materiality of archaeological artifacts to aesthetic phenomena. Privileging the aesthetic is not just a conceptual matter, however: it lurks behind heritage policy, in particular the World Heritage List, that focuses attention and resources on a select number of picturesque or monumental sites while starving the budgets of those who are trying to fend off tomb robbers. The paper ends by offering three suggestions for policy changes that might redirect resources towards protecting the yet-unexcavated past.
Up Close and Personal: Feeling the Past at Urban Archaeological Sites
Public History Review, 2016
In this article I focus on the emotional, sensory and aesthetic affordances of urban archaeological remains conserved in situ and explore what these ruins ‘do’ in the context of the layered urban fabric of the city. I am concerned with a particular category of archaeological remains: those that illustrate the colonial history of settler nations, exploring examples in Sydney and Montreal. Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’ – where emotions work to stick things together and align individuals with communities – I tease out some of the distinctive aspects of this particular form of social/emotional/material entanglement, that appears to create stable objects of memory and identity from a much more contingent and complex matrix of politics, social structures, and the more-than-human materiality of the city. I argue that an understanding of the affective qualities of ruins and archaeological traces, and of how people feel heritage and the past through aesthetic and sensuo...
Ruins in the landscape: Tourism and the archaeological heritage of Chinchero
Aggressive heritage policies implemented by the state in the Peruvian highland town of Chinchero are severing the local population from their material past through processes of de-territorialization and displacement involved in the appropriation of archaeological spaces for tourism exploitation. This management is having an effect on local identity and how residents engage with their landscape. The landscape of the Inca ruins has traditionally been used in different ways and bears the traces of historical relationships, practices and events through which people have constructed a sense of place. Additionally, archaeological heritage management is changing how time is experienced in the landscape and showing how the process of 'cleaning-up' ruins to remove evidence of recent human activities and tidy up fallen stones can remove a sense of time and process for tourist visitors. These ethnographic observations are used to develop new ideas about how we can understand time and change in archaeological heritage sites.
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In this article I interrogate the conjunction of archaeological discovery, narrational packaging of the past for tourism, and discourses of identity, using as my example spectacular burials discovered on the north coast of Peru. I argue that the ancient elite bodies are being manipulated and interpreted within a framework of international cultural heritage tourism, nationalist ideology, and regional assertions against the centralized government in Lima. The archaeological discoveries are being used in their local context to promote economic development around tourism and social well-being around identity on the basis of a newly valorized archaeological past.