2008/08/01 by Anders Gustafsson, Håkan Karlsson · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation #Archaeological Research and Protection #Museums and Cultural Heritage
paper · doi:10.1179/175355308x383991
openalex publication_date 2008/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This article presents a critical and ethnographically directed discussion and comparison of how the World Heritage listed rock carvings at Tanum, Sweden and Val Camonica, Italy are managed and made accessible to the public. The article focuses on how the Swedish and Italian heritage management cultures view the rock carvings as an authentic (i.e. genuine) phenomenon firmly, and solely, belonging to the past and how this contemporary embedded and constructed narrative leads to specific ways of managing, constructing, organizing, presenting, and staging these places for the public. The article stresses that even if the rock carvings were produced in the past, their authenticity is also a product of their role in contemporary negotiations of interpretive supremacy, control, and power between the culture of heritage management and the public. An ethnographical approach, and ethnographical methods, are used. This approach has implications for archaeology and its public relations; in the light of it, activities and phenomena that seem to be completely normal are revealed as examples of the specific culture of contemporary archaeology and heritage management. It is stressed that this culture and its rituals need to be further examined from an ethnographic point of departure.