Cultural Heritage, Community Engagement and Sustainable Tourism

This timely and innovative book critically explores how cultural heritage in the Global South can be used to mobilise community engagement and promote sustainable tourism at archaeological sites.Whilst the volume covers theoretical issues, it primarily offers insight into how both small and large projects within low- and middle-income countries start, plan and develop. It describes what factors lead some projects to succeed, some to fail and most to have elements of both. Core to this investigation, each specifically commissioned chapter considers the challenges of developing collaboration and joint ownership between multiple stakeholders, ranging from local communities to national governments. In addition, the book considers how the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic were managed, with lessons for future events of such magnitude. In summary, this significant volume recognises the value of developing collaborative partnerships between academics, NGOs and local communities, to achieve community engagement within archaeological research and support sustainable development by developing appropriate forms of tourism at archaeological sites. It provides essential reading for those interested in tourism, heritage studies, archaeology, geography, tourism studies and cultural studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Steven Mithen, FBA, is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading, UK. His research interests include the origins of language, music and thought, hunter-gatherers and the emergence of farming. He has undertaken long-term field projects in southern Jordan and western Scotland and is a founding member of a local charity in Scotland (Islay Heritage, SCO46938). His books include The Prehistory of the Mind (1996), After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000–5000 BC (2003), The Singing Neanderthals (2005), Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World (2007) and The Language Puzzle (2024).Mubariz Ahmed Rabbani is working as a research engineer in archaeology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research interests include the study of the archaeology of South Asia and South-West Asia, focusing on ancient technologies, socio-economic and political organisation, trade, religion and human–environmental relationships. He completed his PhD in archaeology at the University of Reading and has worked on excavations in Pakistan, Iraq and the UK. He is Member of the ISMEO Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan.Maria Rabbani is a Palynologist for Oxford Archaeology. She completed her PhD at the University of Reading, which focused on human-environmental interactions in the Zagros region during the Late Pleniglacial, Lateglacial and Holocene, using pollen, non-pollen palynomorph, micro- and macro-charcoal and geochemical analyses. Maria has experience in working on lake and wetland sediment and pollen from the UK, Italy, Iran and Iraq.