Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1017/s1380203822000125
Catherine A. Steidl
Corinna Riva and Ignasi Grau Mira have identified the nexus of several key issues holding back Mediterranean archaeology in the 1st millennium B.C. These are not necessarily issues caused by the application of Big Data methods, but rather preconditions that make this period especially susceptible to the pitfalls associated with those methods. These are: a long-standing ethnocentric focus on Greece and Rome, quantitative and qualitative variability of archaeological data, the presence of both text-rich and text-free regions and, I would add, more than 200 years of archaeological and historical framing within a heavily colonialist bias. Riva and Grau Mira rightly highlight, perhaps most strongly of all, the issue of ethnocentric bias and the centering of Greece and Rome in studies of the 1st millennium BC. Just as Athens, by virtue of an imbalance of data, long acted as a type site for the rest of the Aegean, so have Greece and Rome dominated Mediterranean narratives, as though they occupied the center of the world for every inhabitant of the basin. Archaeology has worked diligently to shed the notion that the foundation of overseas settlements by Aegean Greeks constituted the wholesale Hellenization of the Mediterranean, or that the Athenian experience could serve as generally representative of other parts of the Aegean. Yet the Mediterranean in the mid-1st millennium was only very recently labeled a ‘Greek lake’ (Woolf 2020, 205) – an assessment that would have no doubt come as a great surprise to anyone living west of Sicily (or even Sicilians themselves). As the authors argue, a readily available, rich data set for non-Greek and Roman sites leaves no room to justify ignorance of the rest of the basin, and yet broad knowledge of Mediterranean regions is still wildly uneven. Studies of the western Mediterranean, highlighted by Riva and Grau Mira in their discussion of citizenship and urban belonging, are frequently grouped together in regionally specific thematic studies (e.g. Dietler and López-Ruiz 2009), or are brought together with examples from the central and eastern Mediterranean as part of collections of individual contributions (e.g. Van Dommelen and Knapp 2010). While these are worthwhile endeavours, it is uncommon to see the integration of data from marginalized regions of the Mediterranean brought into direct comparison with data from Greek or Roman contexts (cf. Steidl 2020). A point on which I would invite further discussion is, then, if Mediterranean scholarship remains quite regionally siloed in the 1st millennium B.C., is a decolonized global archaeology a realistic goal at the present time? And how might we best integrate studies of micro-scale diversity within discussion of broader trends? I find much to agree with in the authors’ characterization of 1st-millennium archaeology, and their contention that a microhistorical perspective is essential to enrich global interpretations is well made (and most welcome). Their case study o
{"title":"The feasibility of a decolonized global archaeology in the ancient Mediterranean","authors":"Catherine A. Steidl","doi":"10.1017/s1380203822000125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1380203822000125","url":null,"abstract":"Corinna Riva and Ignasi Grau Mira have identified the nexus of several key issues holding back Mediterranean archaeology in the 1st millennium B.C. These are not necessarily issues caused by the application of Big Data methods, but rather preconditions that make this period especially susceptible to the pitfalls associated with those methods. These are: a long-standing ethnocentric focus on Greece and Rome, quantitative and qualitative variability of archaeological data, the presence of both text-rich and text-free regions and, I would add, more than 200 years of archaeological and historical framing within a heavily colonialist bias. Riva and Grau Mira rightly highlight, perhaps most strongly of all, the issue of ethnocentric bias and the centering of Greece and Rome in studies of the 1st millennium BC. Just as Athens, by virtue of an imbalance of data, long acted as a type site for the rest of the Aegean, so have Greece and Rome dominated Mediterranean narratives, as though they occupied the center of the world for every inhabitant of the basin. Archaeology has worked diligently to shed the notion that the foundation of overseas settlements by Aegean Greeks constituted the wholesale Hellenization of the Mediterranean, or that the Athenian experience could serve as generally representative of other parts of the Aegean. Yet the Mediterranean in the mid-1st millennium was only very recently labeled a ‘Greek lake’ (Woolf 2020, 205) – an assessment that would have no doubt come as a great surprise to anyone living west of Sicily (or even Sicilians themselves). As the authors argue, a readily available, rich data set for non-Greek and Roman sites leaves no room to justify ignorance of the rest of the basin, and yet broad knowledge of Mediterranean regions is still wildly uneven. Studies of the western Mediterranean, highlighted by Riva and Grau Mira in their discussion of citizenship and urban belonging, are frequently grouped together in regionally specific thematic studies (e.g. Dietler and López-Ruiz 2009), or are brought together with examples from the central and eastern Mediterranean as part of collections of individual contributions (e.g. Van Dommelen and Knapp 2010). While these are worthwhile endeavours, it is uncommon to see the integration of data from marginalized regions of the Mediterranean brought into direct comparison with data from Greek or Roman contexts (cf. Steidl 2020). A point on which I would invite further discussion is, then, if Mediterranean scholarship remains quite regionally siloed in the 1st millennium B.C., is a decolonized global archaeology a realistic goal at the present time? And how might we best integrate studies of micro-scale diversity within discussion of broader trends? I find much to agree with in the authors’ characterization of 1st-millennium archaeology, and their contention that a microhistorical perspective is essential to enrich global interpretations is well made (and most welcome). Their case study o","PeriodicalId":45009,"journal":{"name":"Archaeological Dialogues","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47546611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-29DOI: 10.1017/S1380203822000174
M. Reilly
Abstract In the midst of ardent calls for decolonizing and building a more anti-racist archaeology, whiteness has gone largely unacknowledged in the history of disciplinary thought and practice. As a point of departure, this article asks: why are there so many White archaeologists? In addressing this question, I suggest that the development of early archaeological method and thought was deeply affected by White supremacy. In presenting the two case studies of Montroville Dickson and Flinders Petrie, I suggest that a radical new history of archaeology is needed if we are to build a more equitable, anti-racist field in the future. Central to this process to recognizing the role that whiteness has played and continues to play in archaeological practice and pedagogy.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-29DOI: 10.1017/S1380203822000186
S. Wallace
Abstract Reification of ‘community’ and community engagement by professional curators of material culture has recently been critiqued in ways which highlight the diversity of cultural identities and priorities among the general public. When not acting as coherent local communities under professional supervision, people are otherwise curating culture in public space within frameworks of spiritual and creative expression, place significance and identity. Employing primarily secondary sources, I address recent outdoor public curation practices in the West, and consider such deposits in relation to cultural-heritage management, a perspective in which they have hitherto been little addressed. Although these practices typically use accumulations of themed objects to achieve visibility and audience, I conclude that they are ultimately more focused on the individual than on the community, with linkages within and between them highly digitally enabled. Apparently intensified by the effects of recent COVID-19 travel lockdowns, the practices are also linked by their typical colonization of transit spaces (thereby accessing audiences who are also expected participants), by their conscious ephemerality (with deliberate innocence about end destinations of the objects used), and by their use of mundane consumer artefacts. All these features pose challenges to their management, and curated deposits are often contested or removed by official curators or managers of public space, even as the same entities appropriate similar tropes to engage customers. With resurgent interest in tangible culture and physical place following pandemic-era overloading in the virtual domain, with travel habits potentially using different routes, at altered times, and with use of social media continuing to grow, such activities may see increased participation. This analysis suggests that imaginative proactive official treatment of these curations (e.g. by municipal authorities, heritage site curators, rangers or other property owners/managers) could avoid conflict with creators and also help reduce enduring public ‘innocence’ about the disposability of consumer objects. Treatment could involve encouraging ongoing adaptation (digitally recorded and disseminated) of the curated objects in situ by their transitory public audiences.
{"title":"Consumers, curations, ‘community’, contestation and the time of COVID-19. Linkages and perspectives","authors":"S. Wallace","doi":"10.1017/S1380203822000186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203822000186","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Reification of ‘community’ and community engagement by professional curators of material culture has recently been critiqued in ways which highlight the diversity of cultural identities and priorities among the general public. When not acting as coherent local communities under professional supervision, people are otherwise curating culture in public space within frameworks of spiritual and creative expression, place significance and identity. Employing primarily secondary sources, I address recent outdoor public curation practices in the West, and consider such deposits in relation to cultural-heritage management, a perspective in which they have hitherto been little addressed. Although these practices typically use accumulations of themed objects to achieve visibility and audience, I conclude that they are ultimately more focused on the individual than on the community, with linkages within and between them highly digitally enabled. Apparently intensified by the effects of recent COVID-19 travel lockdowns, the practices are also linked by their typical colonization of transit spaces (thereby accessing audiences who are also expected participants), by their conscious ephemerality (with deliberate innocence about end destinations of the objects used), and by their use of mundane consumer artefacts. All these features pose challenges to their management, and curated deposits are often contested or removed by official curators or managers of public space, even as the same entities appropriate similar tropes to engage customers. With resurgent interest in tangible culture and physical place following pandemic-era overloading in the virtual domain, with travel habits potentially using different routes, at altered times, and with use of social media continuing to grow, such activities may see increased participation. This analysis suggests that imaginative proactive official treatment of these curations (e.g. by municipal authorities, heritage site curators, rangers or other property owners/managers) could avoid conflict with creators and also help reduce enduring public ‘innocence’ about the disposability of consumer objects. Treatment could involve encouraging ongoing adaptation (digitally recorded and disseminated) of the curated objects in situ by their transitory public audiences.","PeriodicalId":45009,"journal":{"name":"Archaeological Dialogues","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43174949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-29DOI: 10.1017/S1380203822000162
Julie Lund, Martin Furholt, Knut Ivar Austvoll
Abstract This paper critically examines how power is understood and used in archaeological interpretation of prehistoric societies. We argue that studies on power within archaeology have been haltered in their interpretive potential, frequently limited to individualizing coercive power with androcentric connotations. We explore new avenues of power through a retrospective view. Drawing on ideas first conceptualized by Hannah Arendt, while also incorporating theoretical ideas from collective action, anarchistic theory and the affective turn, we argue that power as a phenomenon and explanation within archaeology can be refined and nuanced when approached through a lens of collective agency and the affective potential of material culture. This connects, furthermore, to how we today see and act on changing power dynamics.
{"title":"Reassessing power in the archaeological discourse. How collective, cooperative and affective perspectives may impact our understanding of social relations and organization in prehistory","authors":"Julie Lund, Martin Furholt, Knut Ivar Austvoll","doi":"10.1017/S1380203822000162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203822000162","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper critically examines how power is understood and used in archaeological interpretation of prehistoric societies. We argue that studies on power within archaeology have been haltered in their interpretive potential, frequently limited to individualizing coercive power with androcentric connotations. We explore new avenues of power through a retrospective view. Drawing on ideas first conceptualized by Hannah Arendt, while also incorporating theoretical ideas from collective action, anarchistic theory and the affective turn, we argue that power as a phenomenon and explanation within archaeology can be refined and nuanced when approached through a lens of collective agency and the affective potential of material culture. This connects, furthermore, to how we today see and act on changing power dynamics.","PeriodicalId":45009,"journal":{"name":"Archaeological Dialogues","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49485811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-10DOI: 10.1017/S1380203821000210
C. Fowler
Abstract This article reassesses the social significance of Early Neolithic chambered tombs. It critically evaluates inferences about social organization drawn from tomb architecture and interpretations of kinship based on aDNA analyses of human remains from tombs. Adopting the perspective that kinship is a multifaceted and ongoing field of practice, it argues that the arrangement of tomb chambers was related to the negotiation of Early Neolithic kinship. Drawing together inferences about biological relatedness from aDNA analyses with interpretations of chamber arrangements, it suggests that variation in the architectural arrangements and sequential modification of chambered tombs relates to different ways of negotiating aspects of kinship, particularly descent and affinity. It presents interpretations of how kinship was negotiated at Early Neolithic tombs in different regions of Britain and Ireland and concludes that it is increasingly possible to gauge pattern and diversity in Neolithic negotiations of kinship, descent and affinity by combining different strands of evidence, including architectural arrangement.
{"title":"Social arrangements. Kinship, descent and affinity in the mortuary architecture of Early Neolithic Britain and Ireland","authors":"C. Fowler","doi":"10.1017/S1380203821000210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203821000210","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article reassesses the social significance of Early Neolithic chambered tombs. It critically evaluates inferences about social organization drawn from tomb architecture and interpretations of kinship based on aDNA analyses of human remains from tombs. Adopting the perspective that kinship is a multifaceted and ongoing field of practice, it argues that the arrangement of tomb chambers was related to the negotiation of Early Neolithic kinship. Drawing together inferences about biological relatedness from aDNA analyses with interpretations of chamber arrangements, it suggests that variation in the architectural arrangements and sequential modification of chambered tombs relates to different ways of negotiating aspects of kinship, particularly descent and affinity. It presents interpretations of how kinship was negotiated at Early Neolithic tombs in different regions of Britain and Ireland and concludes that it is increasingly possible to gauge pattern and diversity in Neolithic negotiations of kinship, descent and affinity by combining different strands of evidence, including architectural arrangement.","PeriodicalId":45009,"journal":{"name":"Archaeological Dialogues","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42384620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203821000180
T. Rico
loom large in the history of the field of heritage in Europe and the United States, Atatürk, one might argue, couldn’t have cared less what European preservationists thought. He had his own agenda. It was a local one, to serve local interests. The point here is not that we shouldn’t critique the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) as hegemonic heritage discourse that leads to a distorted and unequal allocation of heritage value and resources (we should), but that in making the AHD the main focus of our critique we also, perhaps ironically, risk according it more value than it actually possesses, certainly in local communities. One complement to a necessary critique of any hegemonic narrative is to build alternate narratives, and defining a notion of the ‘Islamic’ in heritage helps build and give depth, value and visibility to a local model for heritage preservation practices (Mahdy 2019). Yet it is important to clarify a still frequently misunderstood point: that in its current usage ‘Islamic’ does not only refer to spiritual practice or religious faith alone but to the long, 1,400-year history of the entirety of cultural production in the lands that fell under the rule of Muslim sovereigns. As Shahab Ahmed and Wendy M.K. Shaw have recently argued, in this context, heritage sites and objects that were created by Christians, Jews, Hindus and others can justifiably be called ‘Islamic’ (Ahmed 2015; Shaw 2019). Thus, as has recently been argued, the classical heritage of the Middle East and Europe was and continues to be claimed as a crucial factor in shaping Islamic heritage (Munawar 2019). And this troubling of the ‘Islamic’ also challenges the tidy orthodoxies we use to define the ‘West’ – since Islam always was, and continues to be, a vital shaping force in the history of the West – indeed, a critical part of the history of the European Renaissance in which Western heritage values ultimately find their roots (Trivellato 2010). As Ahmed puts it, ‘Islam contains multitudes’; it has always been a vast sea of competing, sometimes contradictory, discourses. Its long history equally embodies a range of complex traditions with respect to heritage preservation (Rico 2020a; Mulder 2017). To define a site as ‘Islamic’ is not to fix it, then, within the narrow limits of a spiritual tradition – in fact, that narrow view of Islam is one forged by the Western intellectual tradition, and one I am certain that Rico would agree we’d do well to stop reinforcing. It’s our notion of ‘Islamic’ that needs to be expanded, and in doing so, our understanding of Islamic heritage must expand along with it.
{"title":"In support of hybridity. A response to Stephennie Mulder, Ian Straughn and Ruth Young","authors":"T. Rico","doi":"10.1017/S1380203821000180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203821000180","url":null,"abstract":"loom large in the history of the field of heritage in Europe and the United States, Atatürk, one might argue, couldn’t have cared less what European preservationists thought. He had his own agenda. It was a local one, to serve local interests. The point here is not that we shouldn’t critique the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) as hegemonic heritage discourse that leads to a distorted and unequal allocation of heritage value and resources (we should), but that in making the AHD the main focus of our critique we also, perhaps ironically, risk according it more value than it actually possesses, certainly in local communities. One complement to a necessary critique of any hegemonic narrative is to build alternate narratives, and defining a notion of the ‘Islamic’ in heritage helps build and give depth, value and visibility to a local model for heritage preservation practices (Mahdy 2019). Yet it is important to clarify a still frequently misunderstood point: that in its current usage ‘Islamic’ does not only refer to spiritual practice or religious faith alone but to the long, 1,400-year history of the entirety of cultural production in the lands that fell under the rule of Muslim sovereigns. As Shahab Ahmed and Wendy M.K. Shaw have recently argued, in this context, heritage sites and objects that were created by Christians, Jews, Hindus and others can justifiably be called ‘Islamic’ (Ahmed 2015; Shaw 2019). Thus, as has recently been argued, the classical heritage of the Middle East and Europe was and continues to be claimed as a crucial factor in shaping Islamic heritage (Munawar 2019). And this troubling of the ‘Islamic’ also challenges the tidy orthodoxies we use to define the ‘West’ – since Islam always was, and continues to be, a vital shaping force in the history of the West – indeed, a critical part of the history of the European Renaissance in which Western heritage values ultimately find their roots (Trivellato 2010). As Ahmed puts it, ‘Islam contains multitudes’; it has always been a vast sea of competing, sometimes contradictory, discourses. Its long history equally embodies a range of complex traditions with respect to heritage preservation (Rico 2020a; Mulder 2017). To define a site as ‘Islamic’ is not to fix it, then, within the narrow limits of a spiritual tradition – in fact, that narrow view of Islam is one forged by the Western intellectual tradition, and one I am certain that Rico would agree we’d do well to stop reinforcing. It’s our notion of ‘Islamic’ that needs to be expanded, and in doing so, our understanding of Islamic heritage must expand along with it.","PeriodicalId":45009,"journal":{"name":"Archaeological Dialogues","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45197608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203821000234
Beatriz Marín-Aguilera
Abstract Having followed with great interest the latest scholarly literature on ontology-related archaeologies, especially in this journal, this essay will problematise the extractive nature of much of this scholarship in the long-history of Western imperialism, in which Indigenous knowledge has been collected, depoliticised, classified, and then re-signified within Western frameworks.
{"title":"Ceci n’est pas un subalterne. A Comment on Indigenous Erasure in Ontology-Related Archaeologies","authors":"Beatriz Marín-Aguilera","doi":"10.1017/S1380203821000234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203821000234","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Having followed with great interest the latest scholarly literature on ontology-related archaeologies, especially in this journal, this essay will problematise the extractive nature of much of this scholarship in the long-history of Western imperialism, in which Indigenous knowledge has been collected, depoliticised, classified, and then re-signified within Western frameworks.","PeriodicalId":45009,"journal":{"name":"Archaeological Dialogues","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42210548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203821000179
Stephennie Mulder
In 2017, in the aftermath of the highly mediatized destruction of museum objects and heritage sites in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), I edited a special issue of the International journal of Islamic architecture that aimed to explore Islamic attitudes to the material remains of the pre-Islamic past (Mulder 2017). The special issue asked whether, particularly in the premodern period, we can discern an ‘Islamic’ notion of heritage value that pre-dated the modern Western European idea of heritage, and in particular it aimed to lay out an initial conceptualization for several distinct types of heritage value accorded by Muslims to pre-Islamic objects, places and localities. In my editorial essay, I advocated for an effort to define the particularities and contours of an ‘Islamic’ heritage. Also in 2017, the first volume of Trinidad Rico’s important new series Heritage Studies in the MuslimWorld was published: an edited volume whose aim was to disrupt established discourses about Islam and heritage. Rico’s collection explicitly sought not to promote an idea of ‘Islamic’ heritage as a definitional category, but rather took a processual approach in examining what contemporary practices of designating heritage value mean in the context of Islam (Rico 2017b, 2). In particular, Rico argued, Turnbridge and Ashworth’s (1996, 20) definition of heritage as ‘a contemporary product shaped from history’ has not been brought fully to bear in mapping Islamic heritage. In other words, the present-centredness of all heritage, including ‘Islamic’ heritage, is largely unacknowledged, particularly in disciplines outside critical heritage studies. In this article, Rico narrows that broader critique to focus specifically on the question of the uncomfortable relationship that the contemporary Western heritage discourse – as an ostensibly ‘secularized’ one – has had with religious practice more generally and its discomfort with the valorization of the religious heritage of Islam in particular. Rico makes a trenchant and insightful analysis, arguing that ‘two forms of knowing and acting upon historic resources (a universal/ secular and a local/spiritual one) have not been acknowledged enough in the literature of contemporary and critical heritage studies’ (p. 111) – thereby pointing to the fact that the modern, Western universal/secular practice of acting on historic resources is frequently seen as neutral, objective and value-free, when in fact it is laden with preconceived notions of value and significance that inevitably guide the work of heritage practice though the support, funding and visibility of the work of international bodies like UNESCO and other preservation and heritage organizations. I echo Rico’s assessment that ‘experts of a global heritage preservation industry are able to easily mobilize a very selective politicization of religious authority’ (p. 113), a critique that is well founded, important and compelling. Here, I’d like
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