Ancient Monuments Protection Act Act recognizing the need for a governmental administration on the protection of ancient monuments finally passed, after a number of failed attempts on heritage protection acts.
Cultural Resource Management (CRM) The vocation and practice of managing cultural resources, such as the arts and heritage.
The first laws, and other legal decrees to protect national antiquities, ancient monuments, and historic buildings date back to the seventeenth century in Europe, although it was not until the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that such laws became commonplace in the West. These early acts, and other legal instruments and public agencies, included the English Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882, the 1807 chancellery recommendations in Denmark, the establishment in the 1830s of the Comite historique in France, the enactment of a Monuments Protection Act in Germany in 1902, and the 1906 Antiquities Act in the USA, amongst others. A second ‘wave’ of legislative activity occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, stimulated not only by the destruction caused by World War II and the extent of post-War redevelopment, but also the extent of 1960s urban expansion, development, and urban renewal projects. These events, alongside increasing public debate about environmental issues during the 1960s and 1970s, saw the amendment of existing laws to extend the powers of protection and/ or the development of new, more extensive legislation in many Western countries to protect archaeological resources and monuments.
Archaeologists, and before them antiquarians, have played active roles in the development and implementation of this legislation. Individual archaeologists and archaeological/anthropological societies have been active in lobbying for legislation and have even participated in the drafting of bills. John Lubbock and his championing of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882 in England is perhaps the most well-documented archaeological advocate for the legal protection of archaeological sites.
The development of legislation to protect archaeological data - sites, monuments, structures, etc. - has had significant consequences for archaeological practice. Not only did these laws help to protect archaeological data from destruction, looting, and the collecting activities of amateur archaeologists, they also helped formalize the policy process concerned with the protection and management of archaeologi-calsites. This process, often referred to as Cultural Resource Management (CRM) in North America, Archaeological Heritage Management (Europe), and Cultural Heritage Management (Australasia), is often based on legal documents, administered by governmental agencies and supplemented by a range of national and international policy documents. CRM is now the area of archaeological practice that employs the majority of archaeologists, who find employment in national and local government agencies, as private consultants, and in amenity societies, museums, and other public and private cultural organizations.
The CRM process is not only defined by the relevant national legislation and the policy guidelines of national governmental agencies, but may also be influenced by a range of international agreements. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) administers a number of international agreements concerned with the protection of archaeological and other heritage resources. These agreements take the form of Conventions, Recommendations, Declarations, and Guidelines that, while not laws, require Member States (those nations who are signatories to the agreements) to uphold certain practices and principles or face international censure. Relevant agreements include the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (Hague Convention); the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property; the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (the World Heritage Convention); the 1956 Recommendation on International Principles Applicable to Archaeological Excavation; and the 2003 Declaration concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage, among many others. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) is a professional organization that lobbies governments and intergovernment organizations such as UNESCO and ICCROM about the management and conservation of archaeological and other cultural and historic resources. ICOMOS has produced a number of international and national Charters to help guide management, preservation, and conservation practices, and while these are not legal documents, they carry professional authority. Influential international Charters include Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments of 1931; the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (Venice Charter) of 1964; and the Charter for the Protection and Management of the Archaeological Heritage, 1990; while national charters include the Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Significance (Burra Charter), 1999 (Australia ICOMOS) and A Preservation Charter for the Historic Town and Areas of the United States of America, 1992 (US ICOMOS).
The CRM process, with its legal and public policy base, tends to privilege and give authority to archaeological values and practices in the management and preservation of material culture. Not only do archaeologists numerically tend to dominate the CRM process through the various jobs and roles they play within the management process, but it has also often been archaeological values and conceptualizations about the nature and meaning of material culture, or cultural resources, that are embedded in preservation and conservation laws, public policy, and international agreements. Subsequently, archaeologists, their knowledge about the past and basic disciplinary values, are continually legitimized and granted authority on a day-to-day basis through the legal and policy practices of CRM. The authority that archaeological knowledge and values obtain in this way often means that archaeologists are vested with a considerable amount of power over the disposition and fate of material culture. This does not mean to say that archaeologists and archaeological values are ‘all powerful’ - economic expediencies often see the destruction of archaeological sites in the face of major developments. However, what it does mean is that archaeologists and archaeological knowledge and values are often given more power and authority in the management process than many others who may have a cultural, political, or historical interest in, or a stake in, the management of the past (see Who Owns the Past?).
This becomes problematic when other less powerful interests may disagree with or contest the archaeological knowledge, values, and practices concerned with the management, curation, and use of material culture. What is significant here for understanding the ‘politics of archaeology’ is that conservation and preservation laws and policies, through the CRM processes that they establish and maintain, give authority and power to archaeological knowledge and values, often over that of other culturally or historically interested groups.
Conflicts over the management, curation, interpretation of material culture, and so forth, between management archaeologists and other community interests are very common in the CRM process. Of particular note are the conflicts that occur between archaeologists and Indigenous groups in postcolonial countries, often over the repatriation or return of human remains and cultural artifacts from archaeological, government agencies, and museums back to the communities. Although conflicts between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples are often the most visible, other tensions may exist between other community groups and archaeologists over the use or interpretation of material culture. These conflicts are not simply tussles and tensions over the ‘ownership of the past’ as they are often characterized - they are often about the rights and abilities of communities and other groups to control the ways they are represented, recognized, and perceived by the rest of the society. Archaeological sites and artifacts are often valued and characterized in the CRM process as archaeological data, but to many others these things may be more readily understood as ‘heritage’. As heritage, material culture (sites, places, artifacts etc.) stand in for and represent a sense of cultural, social, and/or historical identity. In the wider politics of cultural, social, or historical recognition, it is often important for subaltern community or cultural groups to attempt to control how they are represented.
Subsequently, the conflicts over the possession or rights to control material culture/heritage are not simply about rights of possession, but are important statements of authority and control in the cultural politics of representation. Archaeological interpretations of material culture and the past become more than simple neutral or ‘objective’ statements, but rather themselves work to validate and authorize - or not - community and other interests, knowledge, and claims about the past and their own cultural, social, and/or historical identities. When archaeological views about the past conflict with a group’s own sense of identity, the conflicts can become fraught not only because of the authority with which archaeological knowledge is given in the CRM process and in wider Western culture, but the degree to which archaeological knowledge is used to legitimize, arbitrate over, and regulate other nonarchaeological knowledge claims.
CRM, and the laws that underpin it, may be understood to establish archaeologists and archaeological knowledge within a framework of relations with other interests and interest groups with a stake in how the past is understood. The ‘politics’ of these relations rests on the differential levels of authority and power given to different knowledge claims about the past and the values attributed to material culture. Archaeology cannot be characterized as simply another interest in the CRM process, because of the authority and power given to archaeological knowledge claims in the legal process.
See also: Cultural Resource Management; Historic Preservation Laws; Illicit Antiquities; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; Native
Peoples and Archaeology; Who Owns the Past?; World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws.
World History
