Importantly, the question of the economic value of heritage is necessarily placed center-stage in such projects. I trace the expansion of this expertise across the Middle East and North Africa region, in a variety of contexts where material heritage is mobilized to reduce poverty. Here I address these processes as developmental technologies that produce poverty as a ‘local’ affair, in need of intervention, set in contrast to the traveling and translational abilities of international expertise in heritage management and development. I am interested in how these projects construct particular ‘developmental’ visions of heritage, orienting and circumscribing relationships both with the past and contemporary social contexts. Heritage is becoming a growth field for development projects aimed at producing economic growth and reducing poverty. This requires archaeologists to reconsider their discipline, and the contemporary contexts and situated ethical conditions of their work. These theories provocatively suggest that archaeological practice and heritage management are one and the same, both capable of producing value. Providing an alternative approach to significance, the anthropological work of Weiner and Graeber locates value within practices that manage material heritage.
Moreover, I follow the translation of these management procedures from the national to the global stage to highlight the emergence of economic significance in international heritage management.
Through a genealogy of value in the management of material heritage, I highlight how ‘significance’ has been institutionalized from contingent forms, and the ‘the past’ rendered an object.
An examination of how value works within the diverse practices of archaeology (reconstructions of the past, heritage management and self-reflexive critique) provides an integrating factor to these debates. The concept of value increasingly fills archaeological debates.
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