Glossary

Pompeii A ruined Roman city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. It was destroyed, and completely buried, during a catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius on 24 August 79 AD.

Stonehenge A Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monument located near Amesbury in the English county of Wiltshire, about 8 miles (13 km) north of Salisbury.

World Archaeological Congress A nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization, it is the only archaeological organization with elected global representation.

Archaeology has been an essential part of the development discourse since its very inception at the end of World War II. However, even before this official launching of a Western development project archaeology had been implicated in the production of identity, territorial rights, and national legitimization. Because of its very aura of historical objectivity and scientific rigor, archaeology has traditionally commanded an enormous amount of power in terms of defining the nature and ownership over cultural property and territorial rights. In this manner, archaeology has also been able to muster an enormous amount of influence on allocating and producing complex forms of identity and social alliances with the recent and ancient past.

It is this particular disciplinary heritage that made archaeology an implicit ally in the West’s drive for a global development project that looked to eradicate the most pernicious forms of poverty and illness around the world. In its most implicit forms archaeology consistently provided the historical legitimization for differing groups, including powerful nation-states to rally around the idea of ancestral claims to land and resources that had been bitterly disputed in the region. As Foster has argued, in many ways archaeologists provided for national communities what poppy seed growers have for heroin addicts.

This metaphor captures to some degree the volatile nature of archaeological heritage and the complex place that it holds in the national configurations of identity and resources since the end of the twentieth century. The development project makes use of this archaeology in slightly similar ways, enabling many national groups, including states and oppressed minorities, to use the past to claim access to resources that either had been traditionally denied or monopolized by contesting groups. To this degree the development project exacerbated an already hierarchical difference between first and third world nations (or preferably, global north and south) under the auspices of a paternal (and patronizing) desire to remedy some of capitalism’s most pernicious global impacts.

As a result of this development enterprise, the central role of historical identity in the production of political rights became a viable social enterprise. It is in this fashion that many ancestral Indian (or so called native) communities throughout the Americas, Africa, and Asia began to not only fight for their access to resources but also to reorganize their own political claims and identities in accordance with the new global demands of the nation-state. Archaeology has played an essential role in supporting this new wave of Indigenous/Native human rights agendas, which awakened by the development discourse, present new postmodern forms of identification throughout the world. In this new age of post-industrial capitalism the native is no longer a mere sign of Western oppression but one of cosmopolitan identification.

This complicity between development and archaeology has also found fertile ground in the resurgence of transnational NGOs, progressive social movements, and new forms of eco-tourism that more than ever look to provide a more dynamic understanding of a democratic present (and past). The complex manner of these political reconfigurations both in the global north and south is highlighted below in the following three cases of different regions of the world.