Forwarded message from Christopher Matthews
<[log in to unmask]>:
Dear CHA 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 (9-14 January 2007). We invite your
consideration.
The session abstract is pasted below. Conference information is
available at:
http://www.sha.org/About/Conferences/mt2007.htm
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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