Archaeological Heritage Management in Thailand (original) (raw)

2017, American Anthropologist

In the fall of 2015, I asked my colleague, Professor Helaine Silverman, if she was interested in putting together a special subsection on cultural heritage for this World Anthropologies section of American Anthropologist. I wanted the majority of the authors to be based outside the United States and Europe because issues surrounding cultural heritage management are present in many parts of the world, even though a large number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites are in Europe. 1 For years I have known of Helaine Silverman's passion for cultural heritage management, cultural heritage politics, and the role of UNESCO in designating places-many of them archaeological-as World Heritage Sites. She is, among other things, cofounder and director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy (CHAMP) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2 She has also made professional connections and official exchanges with cultural heritage management scholars, curators, leaders, and institutions, both inside and outside the United States. When she enthusiastically agreed to take on this task, we worked together to identify possible contributors, the length of their essays, the topics she wanted to cover, and her own role in all this. Afterward, she took on the tasks of contacting contributors, encouraging them, keeping them on track, and making sure their essays dealt with the topics she had assigned them, though she also ensured that they would (and could) write from their own vantage points and experiences. For all this-including the interview she conducted for this collection of essays-I am extremely grateful to Helaine. Including archaeologists and museum curators from seven different countries (Malta,