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Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown: Reshaping Archaeological Assessment and Significance. Clay Mathers, Timothy Darvill, and Barbara J. Little, eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 339 pp.
We live today under the ascendant sign of heritage. The word heritage seems to increasingly occupy every social and political-economic current of change; indeed, the rhetoric surrounding this phenomenon seems more and more these days to reside outside of the framework of nationalism and to instead inhabit an imagined global space. The professional resources and traditional remit of the archaeologist are, by contrast, much more localized, and so this situation leaves the archaeologist the very awkward task of teasing out the new boundaries of their own professional commitments and priorities from the seeming endless horizon of expectation and possibility evoked by heritage discourse. Here enters the new Cultural Heritage Studies series, the first volume, Heritage of Value, of which constitutes a decisive call to action for archaeologists and cultural resource managers worldwide to once again wrestle with these very pressing questions of archaeological theory and praxis.
The volume sets out as its first obligation the clarification of core concepts such as "significance," "importance," and "value." Timothy Darvill applies a hermeneutic approach to these questions,...