Archaeological sites opened to the public, and especially those highly photogenic sites that have achieved iconic status, are often major tourist attractions. By opening an archaeological site to tourism, threats and opportunities will emerge.The threats are to the archaeological record, the pre-historic or historic materials in context at the site that can provide facts about human history and the human relationship to the environment. The opportunities are to share what can be learned at archaeological sites and how it can be learned. The latter is important because doing so can build a public constituency for archaeology that appreciates and will support the potential of archaeology to contribute to conversations about contemporary issues, such as the root causes and possible solutions to conflict among humans and the social implications of environmental degradation.
In this volume we will consider factors that render effective management of archaeological sites open to the public feasible, and therefore sustainable. We approach this in two ways: The first is by presenting some promising ways to assess and enhance the feasibility of establishing effective management. Assessing feasibility involves examining tourism potential, which must consider the demographic sectors from which visitors to the site are drawn or might be in the future, identifying preservation issues associated with hosting visitors from the various demographic sectors, and the possibility and means by which local communities might be engaged in identifying issues and generating long-term support for effective management. The second part of the book will provide brief case studies of places and ways in which the feasibility of sustainable management has been improved.
Douglas C. Comer is Principal, Cultural Site Research and Management, Inc. (CSRM) (www.culturalsite.com). CSRM operates in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and Central America. Dr. Comer is President of ICAHM and the United StateNational Committee forICOMOS (US/ICOMOS)
Dr. Comer specializes in planning for the management and interpretation of archaeological sites and landscapes, and in the use of aerial and satellite remote sensing for archaeological research and resource protection. He is a recipient of NSF, SERDP, NCPTT, NASA, ESRI, Kaplan Fund, GeoEye, and other grants, and has published extensively on cultural resource management and the use technology in archaeology.
Dr. Comer has served as the Chief of the U.S. National Park Service Applied Archaeology Center, a Fulbright Scholar in Cultural Resource Management, Chair of the Maryland Governors Advisory Committee on Archaeology, a Research Fellow at the Southeast Asian Center for Archaeology and the Fine Arts (SPAFA) in Bangkok and the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman, Chair of the Nominating Committee for the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA), and a Trustee for the United States Committee for the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS).
Annemarie Willems is the executive director for Friends of ICAHM, an organisation that has been created to support the mission of ICAHM through the dissemination of information concerning world heritage. Since 2016 Annemarie Willems has her own consultancy practice in heritage management, AW Heritage Consultancy. Annemarie Willems holds a MA in Cultural Heritage from the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Upon obtaining her Master's degree in 2007 Annemarie became active at the Centre for International Heritage Activities (CIE) in Amsterdam (currently in Leiden), The Netherlands, as 'Project Officer in Cultural Heritage'. From 2011 until 2015 she lived in Switzerland where she was responsible for international projects at a private company called ArchaeoConcept in Biel that specializes in (archaeological) heritage management. Currently she is still connected to ArchaeoConcept as external expert. She is co-founder and former president of the association ArchaeoTourism2012 which has the main objective to organize conferences and workshops on themes related to archaeology and tourism. Annemarie co-edited the publications that resulted from the two conferences that were organized in 2012 and 2014. In 2015 she published an article in 'Fernweh' titled Solving the Puzzle - the characteristics of archaeological tourism.
