Conservation or Tourism?: Open Air Museums and their Relevance to Archaeotourism.

Abstract: Efforts of conservation create a conflict between the archaeological community and tourism industry. The following paper will discuss the tourism industry and the conflict between tourism goals and the conservation of archaeological material. The focus will be on open air museums and exploring the proposal that these open air museums are a valuable resource for archaeology to pursue alternative, if not better conservation methods and ethical standards while still generating and benefiting from the revenue of the tourism industry. By making use of two contrasting case studies, the open air museum Āraiši in Latvia and the tourist destination of Xunantunich in Belize, the following paper will discuss how these sites are entangled with concepts such as authenticity, conservation, and ethics and the related impacts that these concepts have on each site.