Abstract
This chapter addresses the fundamental question of how the interpretive component of a large archaeological tourism project can best accommodate the often disparate knowledge base and heritage interests of potential tourists drawn from regional, national, and international contexts. In developing tourist attractions for an outdoor “archaeological park” centered on the site of San Isidro, Ecuador, a primary challenge, situated both at the local level and within the heritage tourism design team, has been balancing the role of interpretation based on scientific archaeological research versus interpretation based on more popular and often unscientific views of the local archaeological record. Very often, this discrepancy plays out in terms of an emphasis on archaeological contexts based on sustained archaeological research in the area, versus a focus on archaeological objects, in which the latter are usually derived from looting activity yet heavily inform local heritage identity. In this scenario, interpretative goals can easily bifurcate into parallel realities—one accommodating an international scientific community and scientifically informed tourists, and the other accommodating local, regional, and national heritage identities. This chapter discusses how these disparate interpretive threads can be effectively conjoined into a uniform archaeological narrative by (a) referencing the current heritage identity politics of the Ecuadorian nation-state emphasizing the importance of recovering ancestral knowledge and (b) by exploring Amerindian ontological perspectivism as a means of better interpreting decontextualized archaeological objects.
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Notes
- 1.
See Wylie (1995) for discussion the archaeological use of “looted” data. Numerous scholars have raised the ethical issue of whether or not archaeologists should study, or even make reference to, looted or otherwise unprovenienced archaeological artifacts, the argument being that in so doing, they are unwittingly promoting looting activity and antiquities trafficking by essentially authenticating and raising the market value of the pieces with their scholarly discussions. This argument has a certain amount of validity to it and it is up to each archaeologist to determine where to “draw the line,” so to speak, in including such materials in his or her research. My own stance is that any unprovenienced artifact included in archaeological research and writing must meet all of the following criteria: (a) it must reside in a reputable public museum in its country of origin; (b) said museum must have a unique accession number assigned to the artifact along with records demonstrating when and how it was obtained; and (c) said museum must be able to provide access to the artifact upon request for independent study by qualified scholars. The archaeological collections of the Museos del Banco Central in Quito and Guayaquil fulfill all of these requirements.
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Zeidler, J.A. (2015). Presenting Archaeological Heritage: Identity and Interpretation in Heritage Tourism Planning. In: Biehl, P., Comer, D., Prescott, C., Soderland, H. (eds) Identity and Heritage. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09689-6_15
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