To select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless.
Roland Barthes (1987:76), Mythologies

Preamble

Knossos on a cool March day. Already, despite the earliness of the season, the site is full of tourists, though nothing like the hordes that will be there by June. In small groups of two or five, clutching guidebooks like the faithful grasp their rosaries, or in dutiful processions of thirty or more as congregants in the mass, they move through the site. Are they pilgrims at a holy site, waiting for their moment of revelation, or are they perhaps merely bored, wondering why they are here but staying anyway? Do they stay out of respect, or awe, or mere practicality because they don’t know how to get back to the hotel by themselves? Knossos directs them—and us—to a particular past, to a particular present. But are they aware of this? What does this site, and many others on the island, tell the visitor about their past and more importantly about their present?
These questions plagued me as I made my own pilgrimages to the site over the years. Was I simply being a cynical and jaded academic, who secretly disparages the very people to whom he wants to make archaeology relevant, or was there in fact something to my musings? I became animated by the need to investigate the nexus between archaeological sites and their visitors, and to understand exactly what information about the past is on offer, and why. Tourism not only has the potential to make a significant contribution to a country’s economy. When archaeological sites are actively used to attract tourists, tourism’s tentacles can spread into the very cultural identity of that country to become “an arena where identities are created, reaffirmed and valorized, memories and visual signifiers produced and reproduced” (Hamilakis 2006:159). Thus, as Silverman (2002:883) has noted, “[a]rchaeological tourism provides the opportunity for selective re-creation and reconstruction of the past,” and forces us to confront the construction of a past that is then selectively sold to the public. Who selects? Who controls? To what extent is the public treated merely as a passive consumer of knowledge?
A tourist who enters an archaeological site enters—literally and metaphorically—an intersection of contemporary and historical forces that have already begun to filter the information the tourist receives. The filter is composed of two sieves. The first is made by archaeologists whose selective interest in the past is contextualized within their own individual intellectual paradigms and ideologies. It goes virtually without saying that archaeologists are united in their concern for the protection of archaeological sites and the appropriate use of archaeological knowledge. Yet archaeology’s nature as a privileged study has convinced many archaeologists, most certainly in the past but even today, that they alone are in the singular position of being able to interpret the remnants of the prehistoric past, so a real dialogue (versus a monologue) with the public about what the past means to and for that public is not a high priority. Certainly, as Russell (2006:25) has pointed out, many archaeologists and historians may actually fear the effects of the past’s popularity with the public in that control over the past may be unnecessarily yielded or the past may be misunderstood. Only recently have archaeologists begun to recognize their roles in contemporary cultural production and to take responsibility for the consequences (albeit often unintended) of their actions and their pronouncements.
The second sieve is constructed by the choices made by site managers over what is presented to the public in terms of site access and presentation, and by the tourist industry, both state and private sector, which uses particular archaeological sites, museums, and artifacts—and thereby a particular past—to entice tourists to Crete. The tourist trade is one of Greece’s most important sources of foreign currency, the country receiving each year more foreign tourists (over fourteen million in 2003) than its resident population, just under eleven million people. Greece, along with other countries such as Egypt, Italy, and Mexico, has one of the most well-developed industries in the world for attracting foreign tourists, and the Greek past is one of the more prominent tools in its armory. The website of the Greek National Tourist Organization (GNTO), for example, as well as the myriad marketing tools used by private-enterprise tourist packages, all prominently display ancient ruins or statues (clothed and naked), which occupy the pole position with sun and beaches for alluring tourists. It might be facile to see the tourist industry as a faceless and monolithic entity, coldly manipulating the past for its own profits, though sometimes one does wonder.
Crete offers specific advantages for the type of study in which I am engaged. First, it contains some of the most remarkable sites in Greece, including the site type for Minoan culture, Knossos, the most important archaeological site on Crete, one of the earliest draws in what we today call the heritage industry (McEnroe 2002:69), and also one of the most popular tourist attractions on the island. As many as 8,000 visitors a day, around one million visitors a year, descend on Knossos—figures exceeded in Greece only by visits to the Acropolis (Hamilakis 2002a:2; Papadopoulos 2005:120). Second, the island provides a well-defined archaeological laboratory from both a geographical and a cultural standpoint. Crete is a relatively small island—approximately 150 miles long and fifteen miles wide at its narrowest portion—and its Bronze Age cultures have been studied in detail for well over one hundred years, making it one of the most intensively studied archaeological areas in the world (Hamilakis 2002a:4). Although the island is geographically and culturally an ideal laboratory for archaeological study, it would be unwise to take this analogy too far, for doing so has led to the assumption that the island was characterized by far more cultural homogeneity than was actually the case. Yet somewhat surprisingly, despite the intensity of archaeological investigations on the island and the importance that Greece has in the construction of the ideological concept we term the West, the constitution and contestation of Crete’s Minoan past has not perhaps received the attention it deserves (papers in Hamilakis [2002b] and Hamilakis and Momigliano [2006] are a noteworthy exception).1
This study is predicated on two contentions that need to be more fully aired before proceeding further. The first concerns why the past and present are indeed metaphorical Siamese twins that were never separated at birth. It is contended here that because we in the West conceive of time as proceeding inexorably from past, to present, to future (although the last never arrives), the only way we can make sense of the present is to compare it to what has gone before: “Our lives are a double helix of past and present,” to use Dening’s (1992:9) phrase. Thus, the relationship between past and present constitutes an unavoidable conundrum whereby each informs the other in an endless Mobius strip of meaning. But what do we mean when we say that the past is constructed? The past, as constituted by individual events, happened only once, and its material resistance does serve as a check on its portrayal (Wylie 1992). Therefore, constructing the past does not mean writing fiction, although critics would say that is exactly the turn some have made (for example, Binford [1989: passim]). Nor does it entail a slide into subjective hyper-relativism. Rather, our ability to select only certain aspects of the past as worthy of investigation means, for all practical purposes, that many different versions of the past, all of them having legitimacy, can be created. It is a shame that processual archaeology convinced many archaeologists to deny themselves that luxury. So, the question ultimately becomes not what past is recreated, but what particular version is created of the many pasts potentially available: what questions are asked and what answers are given (cf. Fabian 1983; Hodder 1986; Patterson 1986; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Layton 1989; Trigger 1989; Gathercole and Lowenthal 1994; Kehoe 1998; Silverman 2002). Yet traditional ways continue to dominate public access to the past. The past is recreated (that is, one version is turned into the only reality) by professionals—archaeologists, heritage managers, and the like. This single version is then presented to the public without the opportunity for dialogue or even questioning.
Arguing that the past can be manipulated, as it were, for particular ends requires first a definition of the archaeological record, the entity that is selectively offered to the public. Defining the record is a rather more complex issue than might appear at first blush (cf. Patrik 1985). The archaeological record is defined in introductory textbooks as “the physical remains produced by past human activities, which are sought, recovered, studied, and interpreted by archaeologists to reconstruct the past” (Ashmore and Sharer [2000:246], to use just one example.) Archaeologists have traditionally viewed this record as almost a natural entity that was deposited at some point in the past and now merely awaits the application of relevant methods and techniques to reconstruct the past human behavior it signifies. In traditional archaeology, not all elements of the archaeological record are deemed as worthy of investigation as others, and so for all intents and purposes unimportant elements are excluded from further analysis. Selection can be made by research archaeologists on the basis of particular research goals, for example. However, archaeologists increasingly have acknowledged, even in America, the bastion of scientific archaeology (Wylie 2002:246), that their own disciplinary values are not always paramount in selecting sites and deciding on their treatment and role. Government archaeology and heritage preservation concentrates on those elements of the record that fulfill their own particular mandates, and so the choices for site restoration are affected by state values and ideologies (Price 1994). The converse can apply: in reference to Greece, “lack of pro-active management can itself create a public perception of sites as being of low importance” (Wallace 2005:55). In the traditional view, the archaeological record exists as something outside of our own making, and the subsequent debate devolves to what is selected from that record as worthy of further study or preservation.
There is no need to slide down the slippery slope of hyper-relativism. Of course, sites and the artifacts in museums are real objects that were produced by past human behavior and are differentially preserved by the quirks of natural processes. However, that is emphatically not the archaeological record. The archaeological record is not something that exists outside of our universe of meaning. It is created by us with all our own academic, political, and personal interests in what we consider worth investigating (cf. Patrik 1985; Kotsakis 1999:97). Thus, there is a subtle—but crucial—difference between the archaeological record as something natural that exists outside our world and which we can only reconstruct and protect as its professional stewards—the traditional view—and the archaeological record as something created by us, whether archaeologists or not, as the product of social and cultural needs and ideologies, both past and present, explicit or not. Hamilakis (1999:60) has argued that archaeologists own up to their role “as intellectuals who deal with representation, rather than as stewards of the archaeological ‘record’.” In this view, the record is produced through “disciplinary practices and discourses on identity” and archaeologists must acknowledge their important role in cultural production. Therefore, academic and ideological decisions today and at the time of the sites’ initial investigations determine what is examined, what is ignored, and thereby what constitutes the so-called record. Then, from this record, sites are selected for public access and at the same time certain sets of information are provided, others silenced. Therefore, it cannot in any reasonable way be argued that what gets finally to the public is objective or scientifically constituted.
Site stewardship deals with decisions on what sites and parts of sites are selected for preservation and public access. The traditional view of stewardship is that sites are part of our collective heritage (either national or Western) and, therefore, some of these sites are worthy of preservation for future generations. However, looking to the future subtly lets us off the hook regarding what we do with sites in the present. If sites are preserved for the future, then their potential role for contributing to our understanding of the present can be relegated in importance. One important ramification of this commitment to the future rather than to the present is that it allows public interpretation to be passive, uncontroversial, and anodyne. The past becomes uncontroversial, just the way the tourist industry wants it. Indeed, we can suggest that under this view, sites are corpses, and that the task of site stewardship is simply to develop the most effective embalming techniques. Consider Dening’s (1992:4–5) take on reenacting the past, which really is what we try to do in the stewardship of archaeological sites: we “remove the responsibility of remedying the present by distracted, unreflective search for details of a past whose remedying will make no difference.”
My seco...