Benjamin W. Porter

Heritage Tourism, Conflict, and the Public Interest: An Introduction

This special issue explores how and why conflicts arise in the development and practice of heritage tourism. From New York City’s Ground Zero and the archaeological site of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Mexico, to an Underground Railroad site in Pennsylvania and a post-industrial Massachusetts town, the authors of these four articles are concerned with identifying the often overlapping interests of stakeholders in their attempts to gain access to and guide the development of heritage resources. This issue grows out of a 2003 symposium entitled ‘Resolving Conflicts in Heritage Tourism: A Public Interest Anthropology Approach’, at the 102nd annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, Illinois, organised by Dr Peggy Reeves Sanday, Noel Salazar, and Benjamin Porter of the University of Pennsylvania. The symposium encouraged scholars to consider heritage apart from official and ‘top-down’ definitions as well as how an emerging methodological approach, public interest anthropology (PIA hereafter),1 could be applied to the analysis of heritage conflicts. This introduction places the issue’s key themes of heritage, tourism, conflict, and the public interest in focus and illustrates their intersection in a brief case study from modern Jordan. Following this, the four ensuing articles are discussed with an emphasis on their contributions to the issue’s themes. Heritage and heritage tourism are longfamiliar terms to this journal’s readership and our goal here is not to recapitulate what others have described so well elsewhere.2 In particular, we analyse a process of revaluation that objects, sites, and practices undergo before they are placed within the domain of heritage. Additionally, we explain why tourism is an ideal realm in which to investigate heritage and why the conflicts that erupt around heritage tourism are particularly volatile.

Measuring Local Diversity in Early Iron Age Animal Economies: A View from Khirbat al-Mudayna al-ʿAliya (Jordan)

We use faunal evidence from Khirbat al-Mudayna al-ʿAliya, an agropastoral settlement located in west-central Jordan, to examine early Iron Age subsistence regimes. Analysis of faunal evidence reveals a low-intensity, nonspecialized animal economy dependent on both domesticated and wild species, including freshwater crabs. The subsistence economy of the settlement, we argue, was structured so as to take maximum advantage of its location overlooking the Wadi al-Nukhayla, a perennial water source supporting a relatively verdant floral and faunal array. This diverse and flexible organization made subsistence in this resource-scarce environment more sustainable. When this profile is compared with other early Iron Age southern Levantine communities, the diversity of ways that animal economies were organized during this period is apparent, signaling the need to investigate the local strategies that communities used to adapt to their immediate environmental circumstances, not only ecologically but also socially.

Face to Face with the Past: Reconstructing a Teenage Boy from Early Dilmun

Since 2008, the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project has analyzed the human skeletal remains and artifacts that Peter B. Cornwall excavated from Bahrain in the 1940s, now held in the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. One mode of interpretation and dissemination pursued by the DBP team is forensic facial reconstruction. The subject of the first reconstruction is a twelve- to fifteen-year-old male who lived during the Early Dilmun period (ca. 2050–1800 b.c.e.). The resulting sculpture incorporates skeletal data about his identity and health as well as visual cues grounded in archaeological and sociohistorical contexts. It will be one of two reconstructions at the center of a traveling museum exhibition beginning in 2013. The goal of the exhibition is to present members of past societies to the interested public in a tangible fashion that encourages empathy and an appreciation of our shared humanity.

3-D digital preservation of at-risk global cultural heritage

Recent current events have dramatically highlighted the vulnerability of the worlds material cultural heritage. The 3-D Digital Preservation of At-Risk Global Cultural Heritage project, led by Thomas Levy at UC San Diego, catalyzes a collaborative research effort by four University of California campuses (San Diego, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Merced) to use cyber-archaeology and computer graphics for cultural heritage to document and safeguard virtually some of the most at-risk heritage objects and places. Faculty and students involved in this project are conducting path-breaking archaeological research - covering more than 10,000 years of culture and architecture - in Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, Ethiopia, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, and the United States. This project uses the 3-D archaeological data collected in numerous at-risk heritage places to study, forecast, and model the effects of human conflict, climate change, natural disasters and technological and cultural changes on these sites and landscapes. The greater challenge undertaken by this project is to integrate archaeological heritage data and digital heritage data using the recently-announced Pacific Research Platform (PRP) and its 10--100Gb/s network as well as virtual reality kiosks installed in each participating UC campus. Our aim is to link UC San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to other labs, libraries and museums at the other UC campuses to form a highly-networked collaborative platform for curation, analysis, and visualization of 3D archaeological heritage data.

Old bones, digital narratives: Investigating the Peter B. Cornwall Collection in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum

A joint team of archaeologists from the University of California, Berkeley and Sonoma State University are examining a collection of artifacts and skeletal material excavated by Peter B. Cornwall in Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia in the 1940s and accessioned in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum. Motivated by modern innovations in the examination of skeletal materials and a greater awareness of broader Near Eastern history, we are considering this collection from a contemporary bioarchaeological perspective and in terms of the personal history of Peter B. Cornwall. In this article we discuss our progress, summarizing our analytical work on the objects and human remains, as well as our plans to document our research and the collections using a number of on-line platforms.

National Association of Student Anthropologists: Resolving Conflicts in Heritage Tourism: A Public Interest Approach

Medicine.” Honorable mention went to Dennis Foley (Colgate), for the “Friends’ Gallery Exhibit” and Harold Green for his “Food Aid Management Constituency Study.” The Presidential Perspectives session presentations stimulated active discussion and a broad range of suggestions on future directions for NAPA. A few hlghllghs include: address major policy hues so we have something to say to decision makers and the media; “re-brand” applied/ practicing anthropology to change our fragmented public image; address the appropriation and poor use of anthropological methods by nonanthropologists; reach out to other disciplines; place more emphasis on improving the way that anthropology is taught; establish certification for practicing anthropologists; create more topical interest groups within NAPA to foster communities of practice; ask are applied anthropologists too practical, and should we capture relevant theoretical frameworks-theories that work; do a better job of serving the needs of MA anthropologists; hold virtual conferences via email to engage practicing anthropologists who cannot attend annual conferences. If you would like to share your views on these suggestions or offer additional ideas, we invite you to participate in one of the following NAPA worlung groups: shaping the public image of anthropology; supporting career and organizational development; creating opportunities for information and resource exchange among professional anthropological researchers and practitioners; building community among students and professional practicing anthropologists by communicating effectively with our members. Please con-