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To list members (please excuse cross-postings)
CALL FOR PAPERS: We are organizing a session on the Archaeology of
Tourism for the 2007 Society for Historical Archaeology conference
planned for Williamsburg, VA in January 2007. We invite your
consideration.
The session abstract is pasted below. Conference information is
available at: http://www.sha.org/
The submission deadline for the conference is June 1, 2006, we
kindly ask that you provide us with abstracts for our review by May
15, 2006.
Please respond to: [log in to unmask]
Thank you.
Chris Matthews and Matt Palus
The Archaeology of Tourism
Session proposal for SHA '07, Williamsburg
Christopher N. Matthews (Hofstra U) and Matthew Palus (Columbia U),
Organizers
Abstract.
Archaeological sites and representations are a growing component of
the global tourism industry. The material presence of sites and
museums on the landscape combined with their allusion to distant
places and cultures produces an aura of authenticity attractive to
modern tourists. Tourism is so important within archaeology that
the accommodation of tourist access while maintaining a dedication
to preservation and research interests of archaeologists and their
collaborators is an increasingly common practical and ethical
concern. This growing trend also reflects the now widely accepted
sense that the past is a public (writ popular) resource, an idea
that also supports that presentation of the past for popular
consumption. While conservation (saving the past for the future)
is a valuable ethic, it may benefit from an examination of its own
history and materiality.
The proposed session considers the archaeology of tourism with the
intent of offering a critical perspective on the situation of the
tourist industry within capitalism. Its aim is to examine with
archaeology how a diversity of sites have been conceived and
constructed as touristic so that we may better understand now what
tourists expect from their experience. This involves both
archaeological examinations of sites created in the past as well as
archaeological and ethnographic studies of the way sites and museum
representations are constructed and experienced today. Certainly,
the entanglement of past and present touristic sites and
experiences is also a ripe location for potentially powerful
research.
Our premise is that in archaeological tourism it is tourists and the
tourism industry that hold the upper hand. Yet, we maintain, an
examination of the materiality of tourism creates opportunities of
presenting for touristic consumption material histories of tourist
sites that may grant visitors the space for a now-absent critical
reflection on their experience as tourists in the modern world.
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