Revenge of the Nerds, or Why Do Modern Archaeologists Identify with Early Antiquarians?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Laws for the preservation of tangible heritage posit historical and cultural significance as a form of intrinsic value that makes objects worth preserving. In the nineteenth century, arguments for this sort of preservation were meant to counteract vernacular practices that treated ancient ceramics or architectural remains as “mundane” objects that could legally be subjected to sale, manipulation, or destruction. Using a number of historical examples, this paper will trace how the figure of the eccentric and disdained antiquarian was used to articulate this preservationist principle in the first half of the nineteenth century. Though the legal principle of tangible heritage protection could be considered hegemonic today, the figure of the disdained antiquarian continues to figure in different performances through which heritage professionals legitimate state-sponsored preservation, even when this comes into conflict with the interests of indigenous descendant communities and other marginalized stakeholders. This disjuncture between the historical roots and contemporary realities of the heritage narrative provides a useful point of departure for rethinking core assumptions of preservation practices in the twenty-first century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37811.0