Archaeological Heritage as a Resource for Development: Definitions, Issues, and Opportunities for Evaluation

Abstract

Archaeological heritage has significant impacts on development in the Global South. Projects have informed environmental policies or improved local communities’ prospects in managing their heritage resources, and sites promote local economic development through tourism. However, many of these development impacts are short-lived or disappointing due to a lack of critical awareness and tracing of how the project fits with local objectives and its consequences over time. This is related to inadequate or insufficient evaluation.

This paper argues that the heritage sector has much to gain from considering evaluation problems through a development lens. It reviews how archaeology contributes to development, the successes and shortcomings of past efforts, and how evaluation can help. The paper then discusses public archaeology as a natural theoretical and methodological bridge between archaeology and international development, and examines the limits of current evaluation methods, which are not systematic or focus on a limited number of impacts.

Looking ahead, the review recommends testing development evaluation methods in the context of archaeological projects to develop the toolbox of evaluation methods available in the heritage sector.

keywords:

• public archaeology
• development
• evaluation
• impact
• methods

Acknowledgements

This article was significantly reworked thanks to the comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers. I also thank Laura Camfield, George Lau, Tim Schadla-Hall, Jonathan Franklin, and Jacob Bongers for providing insightful comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, for example, Sustainable Goal 8.9: ‘By 2030, devise and implement policies to promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products’ (UN, 2020).

2 The travel cost is estimated based on the distance visitors had to cover, as well as money spent on food, drinks, accommodation, and opportunity costs. It is used as a proxy for how much people are willing to spend to visit the site (Douglas, 2014: 46).

3 Contingent Valuation usually consists in assessing survey participants’ ‘willingness-to-pay’ (WTP) to prevent the destruction of an asset, in this case the site of Çatalhöyük (Douglas, 2014: 46). In other cases, their ‘willingness-to-accept’ (WTA) a compensation for the destruction of an asset can also be measured (Burtenshaw, 2014: 26).

4 The expenditure multiplier method tracks how much extra income is generated from each dollar invested in the project (Douglas, 2014: 47).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Agathe Dupeyron

Agathe Dupeyron is a PhD candidate in International Development at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her main research interest is in evaluation and she focuses on testing methods that are appropriate for understanding and monitoring the social, economic, and environmental impacts of archaeological projects on three communities in Peru and Ecuador. She previously volunteered in archaeological projects in the UK and Latin America.