Heritage: History and the Past Today

Spring 2007

Heritage is an opportunity to explore a wide range of concerns relating to the past and history in the present.

As a Historical Archaeologist, I have been teaching on the dynamic meanings and uses of material culture in a wide array of cultural anthropology and archaeology courses, but particularly in Historical Archaeology.  Over my years at New College, several students built on Historical Archaeology to write their senior theses exploring how the meanings of objects or landscapes change (see list of Anthropology theses). Centered by the anthropological concern for variation, they observe how different groups have contrasting meanings of the same thing/place/time period.  By attending conferences and chatting with colleagues, I saw the connections between those anthropological studies of the past and the emerging field of Heritage Studies. Based on my efforts on Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past (AltaMira 2004) and various projects grouped as Public Archaeology in Sarasota, I created this course for Fall 2005.  As an anthropologist focused on the meaning of the past for the present, I find contextual studies of the past and history significant for bringing out change and diverse meanings, for revealing diversity and variation.

The course grows out of ethnographies of archaeology.  Archaeology is better known for studying material attributes from past societies, but anthropological archaeology includes those studies plus the study of material culture and the meaning of the past for the present. This particular course is interdisciplinary, employing scholarship from Heritage Studies, area studies, Geography, History, Sociology, as well as Anthropology.  The course is an opportunity to introduce students, particularly first year students, to the developments in heritage studies and to the anthropological perspective on history and the past. As David Lowenthal notes in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History: "All at once, heritage is everywhere..." The course explores that centrality in our world today.

The course is a first-year course: there are no prerequisites or expectations beyond an enthusiasm for the subject matter and a commitment to the scholarship introduced over the semester.  The course fulfills New College's LAC requirements but not the requirements for the Anthropology AOC.

The Course Syllabus contains the list of readings and projects.

Other resources include:

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation http://www.achp.gov/

American Century Project http://www.americancenturyproject.org/

American Memory from the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

Center for Heritage Resource Studies http://www.heritage.umd.edu/INDEX.htm

English Heritage http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/

Heritage Watch http://www.heritagewatch.org/

Illicit Antiquities Research Centre http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/IARC/home.htm

National Park Service - Links to the Past http://www.cr.nps.gov/

National Park Service - Our Shared Heritage http://www.publichistory.org/index.asp

National Trust for Historic Preservation http://www.nationaltrust.org/index.html

Project Archaeology http://www.projectarchaeology.org/#

Public History Resource Center http://www.publichistory.org/index.asp

World Heritage - UNESCO http://whc.unesco.org/en/home/

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