ABSTRACT
As more and more countries discover the foreign revenue to be gained from tourism, so do those countries turn to their archaeological and historical pasts to entice foreign visitors, whether it be through the private-sector heritage industry or government-controlled or -sponsored agencies. As tourism becomes an increasingly global phenomenon and as the past is co-opted more and more into the tourism industry, archaeologists concerned with the social and political ramifications of their profession can plough fertile ground by examining precisely how messages about the past are conveyed to the touring public through this co-optation, and thereby how those same messages can legitimize or destabilize particular contemporary ideologies. Such examinations also answer the call for more anthropological interest in the effect of cultural contact on the guest communities (in this case, tourists) rather than on the host cultures themselves (in this case, Crete and its Minoan past), important though the latter may be. The increased attention that the public is paying to the archaeological past may be welcomed by the discipline, but it comes at a price: archaeology is faced with a Faustian bargain (Russell 2006:22) “in its relationship to modernity, especially with regard to the role of images of the past in heritage and tourism industries.”
