RESEARCH INTERESTS

Central Andean archaeology, complex societies, archaeology and popular culture, globalization, nationalism, identity, heritage management, tourism, museums, spatial theory, architectural history, landscape history

I am an archaeologist (Ph.D., 1986, University of Texas at Austin) with expertise in the Central Andes and with specific research interest in non-state complex societies, specifically those on the south coast of Peru (Paracas, Topará, Nasca). Between 1983-1995 I conducted excavations at several major sites and surveys in various valleys of the region. I continue to write on this topic, focusing on the variations in Andean sociopolitical organization, what caused them, and how variable a society could be while still being “Andean” in cultural terms. This issue is implicated in contemporary debates about ethnogenesis, social identity, materiality, and the production of culture. I argue that scholars must distinguish between an improper essentializing view of Andean culture and society and a valid recognition of the essential qualities that define and enable Andean people to create meaningful lives, qualities that were actively constructed and elaborated by them over millennia.

During my archaeological fieldwork I came into frequent contact with tourists seeking to experience and documentary filmmakers seeking to portray “mysteries of the ancient world.” Especially through my participation in several television programs and consultancies on many more I became interested in the appropriation and representation of Peru’s past and the contemporary social and political context of archaeology overall. My applied archaeological perspective aims to link ancient and modern Peru through attention to major cultural processes evident in both social formations, thereby demolishing the artificial and unproductive wall created by traditional disciplinary concerns.

In 2003-04 I conducted a research project (supported by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research) in Cusco, the former Inca capital. I examined how the Peruvian nation-state and its official agencies and different constituencies within Peru, as well as the global tourism industry and popular media, have constructed the Peruvian past and the contemporary national identity, and the role of archaeology in the cultural construction of space, place, memory, and identity in Peru. I am now writing up the results of that project.

In addition to my principal appointment in Anthropology I am affiliated with the Department of Landscape Architecture and interact closely with colleagues there who share my interest in heritage and museum issues, understood broadly. I co-direct with Prof. D. Fairchild Ruggles of that department the interdisciplinary graduate track in Cultural Heritage Landscape studies (CHL). I also co-direct (with Prof. Ruggles) the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices (CHAMP). I coordinate an interdisciplinary faculty reading group on “Museums Writ Large” (sponsored by the university’s Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities).

1. Re-installation the Gallery of Ancient Peruvian Art at Krannert Art Museum (http://www.kam.uiuc.edu).

2. Co-editorship (with William H. Isbell, SUNY-Binghamton) of the Handbook of South American Archaeology (to be published by Springer), a continental compendium of more than fifty chapters written by leading scholars from South America, the United States and Europe.

3. Analysis and publication of the twenty years of correspondence between Julio C. Tello and Toribio Mejía Xesspe, two of the key figures in Peruvian archaeology in the 1920s-1940s. These letters provide invaluable insight into the intersection of nationalism and archaeology in Peru as well as the development of a uniquely Peruvian archaeology.

4. I am the editor (March 2008-March 2011) of Latin American Antiquity, one of the two journals published by the Society for American Archaeology.

A New Book Series from Left Coast Press (www.lcoastpress.com)
Series Editor: Helaine Silverman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
letters of inquiry welcome, please email: helaine@uiuc.edu

Heritage, Tourism and Community is an innovative new book series that seeks to address the interconnected issues of heritage tourism and community development from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Manuscripts are sought that address heritage and tourism and their relationships to local community, economic development, regional ecology, heritage conservation and preservation, and related indigenous, regional, and national political and cultural issues.

The series premise is that archaeological and historic sites, specific buildings, museums of various types, performances (intangible heritage), and natural environments are all venues for the construction and display of heritage by the tourism industry and by communities (up to the level of the imagined community of the nation), sometimes in consort with or opposition to each other (heritage as a site of struggle). Of particular interest are policy parameters (including those of the particular governmental and/or non-governmental entities involved) and policy’s implications for the affected communities (for instance, in terms of the construction of identity around heritage and continued access to its tangible manifestations or participation in its ephemeral performances).

Also important to consider are recursive issues of representation: how “others” are represented to tourists and how tourists are perceived by the host (willing or not) community; the different meanings and understandings of heritage held by different stakeholders that revolve around sites/performances; class issues; gender issues (from tourism’s differential impact on communities to how men and women travel); and the role of various brokers such as tour guides and travel agents.

Many communities around the world, including in the United States, are building and claiming their heritage on the basis of tourist attractions or sites/peformances that they wish to develop as tourist destinations. In the case of U.S. Civil War re-enactments, we are dealing with a multi-sited identity (descendant or adopted). Other heritage identities are more place-fixed. The presidential victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia can be understood in the context of the Aymara peoples’ long-term struggle for physical and ideological control of the great ruins of Tiwanaku with which they identify as a descendant community. Australian Aboriginals vigorously defend their cultural traditions and ancestral territories against intrusive tourism at sites on their indigenous sacred landscapes. African-Americans take tours of slave castles in Ghana whose meanings are multiple and contested for the Ghanians. Some post-Holocaust Jews undertake a “dark” form of heritage tourism to Auschwitz in Poland where both unremitting anti-Semitism and a new chic appropriation of Jewish culture by enlightened Poles compete and co-exist. Maya Indians negotiate their identities, traditions and rights within a booming five-country tourism route. In Egypt there is tension between tourism’s appropriation of the pharaonic past, the government’s promotion of the ancient Nile civilization as Egypt’s contribution to the world’s cultural heritage, and the population’s overwhelming identification with its more recent Islamic heritage.

Tourism today is recognized as the world’s greatest global industry in terms of revenue generated and human movement. In First World countries and the Developing World, tourism is dramatically impacting the lives and livelihoods of surrounding populations and the economic and political strategies of the nation-states in which they are embedded. So important is tourism in real and symbolic terms that several of the worst terrorist attacks in recent years targeted tourist sites (Luxor and Bali spring readily to mind). Even remote villages seek to market themselves as tourist attactions on the basis of noteworthy sites or traditional cultural performances; regions within a country compete with each other for tourists; and entire countries spend lavishly on slick ads in upscale magazines in an attempt to capture a major share of tourism’s dividends.

The richly complex and pragmatically complicated intersections of heritage, tourism and community offer an exciting intellectual space for dialogue, with application to real world situations. That is the goal of the book series.

The volumes in this series are all single-author (or co-author) case studies, not edited volumes. The ideal book will convey the key elements of a specific case of heritage tourism development, highlighting the value of the case study to those practicing in this field (anthropologists, archaeologists, public historians, policy makers, urban planners, etc.). The volume should be driven by theory and practical principles drawn from the cases that demonstrate the book’s relevance to issues of concern to the series’ wide readership. Comparisons to other relevant case studies are strongly recommended so as to contextualize the monograph’s argument. Volumes cannot limit themselves to purely descriptive studies of individual heritage tourism projects and how obstacles were overcome in that setting.

Manuscripts will be 150-300 pages double-spaced (35,000-70,000 words), with up to 40 illustrations. A style guide for manuscript preparation will be sent to authors.

Manuscripts will be reviewed by the series editor and appropriate members of the editorial board.

A prospectus should include the following information: