Introduction : heritage and archaeology

The impetus behind this volume emerged from a session organized at the Theoretical Archaeological Group (TAG) Conference hosted by the University of York in 2007. The aims of the session, and subsequently this volume, were to examine the conflation of heritage with archaeology and ask whether archaeology could usefully contribute to critical understandings of heritage. Any critical understanding of heritage, we suggested, must consider heritage both in terms of what it is and the cultural, social and political work it does in contemporary societies. Our rationale for proposing such a session arose from the observation that archaeology has, on the whole, tended to dominate the development of public policies and practices applicable to what is often referred to as “heritage”, but what some might also call “the historic environment” or “cultural resources”, amongst other terms. As a consequence, archaeologists have been very successful in protecting what they perceive to be their database—a success that owes much to the development and maintenance of a suite of heritage management practices that work to legitimize their privileged access to, and control of, that database. However, is archaeological data actually heritage? Moreover, does archaeological knowledge offer a meaningful reflection of “the historic environment”, in terms of the uses, values and associations it carries for the various and different communities or publics that engage with that environment/heritage?