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September 27, 2009

In this weeks class we discussed tourism and whether or not it is beneficial to archaeology. We discussed the funding that is brought in by tourism and how governments take this money and allocate it based on the most popular tourist sites, rather than taking the income generated by a specific site and returning it to that specific site for improvements and maintenance. While visiting Turkey this summer, I found that this was a problem as there were many beautiful sites, but most of them were overgrown and only those that are near cruise ship harbours (Ephesus) and could bring in thousands of tourists a day seemed to be given funding for maintenance.

I suppose this is a good thing because Ephesus is a large site and has a lot to offer; but if all the money is going towards popular sites alone, interest in other sites is neglected, and it goes against what archaeology actually needs, because if no one is interested then there aren’t going to be any funds. Yes, the popular sites would still be generating money, but if people only want to see popular sites, then how can an archaeologist justify and generate interest in new endeavours?

Another problem I have with this system is that as a tourist when you are paying money to see a site, there is sort of an expectation that it will be accessible, clean, and informative rather than overgrown and with information about that particular site no where to be found on the actual site.

I think it would make more sense to sell the sites to private organizations as opposed to the government organizations which can only focus so much attention on history, and in my opinion generally just see the dollar signs rather than the educational and sentimental value of a site to a tourist. With private organizations managing the sites, the smaller groups would be able to focus more attention on their collection of sites and in turn run promotions, advertise and even possibly create tours of closely linked sites so tourists would be able to get more of a feel for what ancient cities were like – seeing that there is more than just “the one”. Added to that, having these sites owned by private companies would allow for more maintenance and I believe that more could be done at these sites in terms of “attractions” and discoveries.