Theme: Towards a Positive Interface between Archaeological Heritage and ‘Development’
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Workshop Synopsis
Governments of Ghana have over the years identified cultural traits and heritage as markers of the nation’s identity, and key to the nation’s tourism development agenda. However, increasing development action involving large-scale constructional activities threaten the nation’s archaeological heritage, as many sites, buildings, and other relics of archaeological value are destroyed without being researched and documented. In the midst of a weak legal framework, archaeology as a discipline, and archaeological studies of construction sites and heritage resources endangered by development activities lack adequate institutional support. The workshop will thus seek intellectual frameworks and practical measures by which heritage studies can be mainstreamed in Ghana’s development agenda, while stimulating actions that will engender synergistic relationships between heritage and development practitioners, and policy makers.
The workshop will bring together academics with experience in archaeological heritage management, as well as graduate students from the University of Michigan, USA, University of Witwatersrand, and University of the Western Cape, South Africa, the University of Bristol, UK, and the British Museum, London, to share their experiences with their Ghanaian counterparts from the University of Ghana, the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, and the Techiman Traditional Council.
Participants will brainstorm the relationship between archaeology as heritage, interrogate layered and often contested narratives that coalesce at heritage sites, and find common grounds for defining contextualized approaches to heritage studies and for mitigating threats that development poses for archaeology and history in Ghana, and elsewhere in Africa.
