The Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site and Transnational Heritage

Abstract

Archaeology is an academic discipline; the things, services, experiences, and information intentionally produced or created as by-products of archaeology are, in economic terms, goods, and these goods are traded in the marketplace. Understanding this is essential to successfully dealing market forces that threaten the academic objectives of archaeology, which can only be achieved by examination of archaeological materials in an uncontaminated state and original context.In economic terms, an archaeological good can range from a body of knowledge of the sort that the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz calls a global public good, to those that he terms local goods, which would include artifacts, services, or experiences ( Stiglitz 1999:310). The latter can be produced and consumed in ways that threaten the former. I argue that that the demand for archaeological and more generally "cultural" goods is driven in large part by the ubiquitous human need to establish an identity, that is, to establish a position in the "cognitive chart" that allows humans to navigate through society (see, for example, Spradley 1979 ).It would follow that anthropology has much to contribute to economic models. A word of clarifi cation is essential here: I will address below formalist models, as opposed to a substantivist arguments, both of these terms coined by Karl Polanyi ( 1957 ), and the latter bolstered by the work of ethnographers half a century ago (Bohannon 1965 ). The school of thought established by these scholars has become known as economic anthropology. In what follows, however, I will assume, as mainstream, formalist economists do, that supply and demand are the basic determinants of market structure, and that, therefore, to better understand and direct market structure, it is necessary to identify as precisely as possible the forces that alter supply and demand. One might say that the approach taken here is an anthropological economics as opposed to traditional economic anthropology. Much more could be said about the value of conducting economic analysis informed by anthropology,

Frontiers and Mobilities: The Frontiers of the Roman Empire and Europe

“…Although the promotion of the ancient frontier works of a militarized dictatorship may appear to be a problematic context for communicating an idea of common heritage (Hingley, 2015a), the co-operation of archaeologists and heritage managers in the FREWHS initiative has championed a World Heritage Site with major public appeal. The Roman frontiers are likely to continue to form an increasingly popular series of heritage landscapes and draw in visitors from far afield, from Europe at least.…”