Marvelous

" The language of cultural resource management might be termed the language of cultural capitalism It is a practice in which a series of individuals assert a hegemonic claim to the past and organize the temporal passage of this cultural capital from its historical context to the present of spectacular preservation, display, study and interpretation The professional body decides on the basis of its claimed knowledge what is worth either preserving or excavating After subsequent interpretation or conservation the public, or non-professionals, are informed that this is then past, their heritage, and that it should be meaningful to them
The language used and the strident advocacy of professionalism does not make the past produced any less alien from the public (or the 'client') but only more so All that is required of the non-professional is to consume the past presented at a distance and in leisure-time. The past, history or archaeology becomes an other, an alien factor passing before people. For the public the commodified past has the contradictory relation to the buyer of any commodity: available to purchase while mysterious in its origin, in the technology of its production. The production of the past remains a mystery isolated from the present in the hands of the professional elite or the authoritative planner.
Reaction against the sense of alienation created may take the form of pot hunting, metal
detecting or unauthorized excavation.
What is needed is not the promotion and protection of a commodified past but its active reworking in the present by archaeologists who do not assert themselves as managers of some unspecified general heritage, a mythical landscape worn with time. What is at stake is not the preservation or non-preservation of the past but the practice of archaeology. This practice has come to lie increasingly in the power of a professional self-appointed minority and it tends to have the effect of denying people their active participation in history, in the practice of making history and coming to an understanding of the present past. Instead what is all too often presented by the 'managers' is a petrified past which is constantly in need of preservation, a decaying corpse in need of embalming before the smell becomes too strong."

Tilley e Shanks, (1992) Re-constructing Archaeology. London Routledge