Commentary: Archaeology as Travel and Tourism

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Jun 2011

Matthew H. Johnson

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Commentary: Archaeology as Travel and Tourism

Matthew H. Johnson 0 ) School of Humanities, University of Southampton , Avenue Campus, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BF, UK - In their introduction to this special issue of the IJHA, Maria ODonovan and Lynda Carroll speak of the original session at the York 2005 SHA meetings that formed the springboard for this volume, and of their very sensible decision to limit its scope to nineteenth- and twentieth-century tourist sites in the United States. In this brief commentary, I want nevertheless to place these papers in a wider context, in terms of space, time, and theoretical perspective. In particular, I want to draw out what we have learnt about the close relationship between the practice of archaeology and the practice of tourism. I want to suggest that the archaeological gaze and the tourist gaze are not so very far apart; that archaeologists would do well to be more reflexive about the relationship of their work to the practices of tourism; that the line drawn between archaeological and tourist practice is quite a fine one. Such an observation should not surprise us. After all, both archaeology and tourism are artifacts of modernity (Thomas 2004; Urry 2002). LouAnn Wurst and Stacy Lynn Camp rightly stress how tourist practices push the labor relations that sustain them into the background, or remove them from sight entirely. Something similar, of course, happens to the labor of diggers, finds assistants, and so on in the archaeological process. Troy Lovata reminds us that the relationship between scholars and tourists has never been one-directional, and it has rarely been a distant one either. I think the point is worth stressing, however, because in much of the academic literature on tourism there is more than a hint of elitism. The tourist gaze is seen as being commodified, packaged, limited; even as the concept of authenticity is critiqued (Urry 2002, pp. 122123), so, it is implied, the tourist experience is somehow inauthentic, at least when held up against dispassionate academic knowledge. Archaeologists themselves, of course, go on holiday from time to time, and it is not always clear when tourist activity begins and academic work ends; was a Chicago professor, wandering around the exhibits organized by Franz Boas at the 1893 Worlds Fair, working or being a tourist? This bordering terrain, even shared terrain, can be demonstrated by a brief tour (tourist trip?) through the history of archaeology. Arguably, the first archaeological traveler in the English-speaking world was John Leland. In the opening decades of the sixteenth century, Leland set himself the task of traveling from one corner of England and Wales to the other. Leland armed himself with official travel documentshis appointment as Kings Antiquary in 1533 was the result of his own lobbyingand documents signed by Henry VIII secured him official sanction for his enquiries. Leland traveled from monastery to castle to town, and he noted down what he saw in what to the modern reader seems a random and unsystematic jumble. Leland planned to bring order and method to his observations by writing a book entitled De Antiquitate Britannia. However, the task of bringing order to his observations must have been too much for Leland, because the poor man went mad before he was able to complete the task (Parry 2007, p. 34). Leland wanted to see things, and he wrote down what he saw. A central and guiding element of the archaeological process, and the tourist gaze, is the desire to see things for oneself rather than trust to what one reads in books (the science fiction writer Asimov (1995, p. 75) wrote of a fictional future in which lack of such curiosity was a key diagnostic trait of cultural decline and stagnation). It is arguable that such a desire to go out and look sprang, in part, from the guiding principles of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, in which many natural philosophers sought to actively discard the texts of the Ancients and replace such authorities with trained empirical observation. Such a desire, of course, immediately raised issues of what counted as trained empirical observation and in particular whose word was to be trusted, for example, the word of a gentleman (Shapin 1996, pp. 8596). The desire to observe, and conversely a distrust of accepted knowledge, requires a radical separation between subject and object, in order to create the conditions in which the object can be observed. It also required a radical separation between the (unreliable) world of everyday opinion and the (reliable) world of the educated gentleman. Such an argument is an oversimplification, but it is certainly true that the origins of archaeology as a discipline were bound up with two particular forms of travel and nascent tourism. The first was the Grand Tour. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocratic men, and occasionally aristocratic women, finished their education with travel to the great cities of Europe and the Mediterran (...truncated)


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Matthew H. Johnson. Commentary: Archaeology as Travel and Tourism, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2011, pp. 298-303, Volume 15, Issue 2, DOI: 10.1007/s10761-011-0143-0