ABSTRACT
There can be no doubt that the ever-increasing fascination with heritage and its material forms is part and parcel of the process we call globalisation. A yearning for roots, tied to specific material places, embodies a nostalgia fashioned in the face of the apparent rootlessness and destabilising rapidity of global flows. With this widening perspective of the global contexts of material heritage, and how material heritage actively constructs these global contexts as well, the prominence of the socio-economic character of archaeological goods and material heritage is brought into sharper relief. We can see more clearly how archaeology and heritage operate within a political economy of resource management, cultural property, land tenure, development, propertied interests, the antiquities trade, tourism, traditional craft reproductions, and global structural inequalities. In the background, quietly negotiating and structuring these broader socio-economic and political relationships, is the spectre of poverty. Material heritage has a deep and complicated relationship with poverty. So pervasive is this indicator of inequality that it is taken for granted that such inequalities form a permanent part of the global landscape. At the same time, poverty is rendered less threatening by treating it as a technical problem, to be fixed through expertise. Therefore as poverty and heritage become bundled together in a nexus of concerns within development and heritage management, material heritage is increasingly mobilised within projects that purport to tackle this technical problem of poverty.
