ABSTRACT
Today, cultural tourism, which includes archaeology, is one of the fastest growing segments of the travel business (Bruner, 1996). Sites such as the Parthenon; the Temple of the Sun God Amun at Karnak, Egypt; Stonehenge; and Teotihuacán, Mexico, receive millions of visitors a year, most of them on carefully organized and scheduled package tours. Today, more people visit the Pyramids of Giza in one month than would have visited them over many years a century ago. Today, thanks to the jumbo jet and the cruise ship, the past is under siege by visitors. It was not always so. Persepolis in Iran was the seat of the Achaemenid kings, among them Darius I (521 to 486 b.c.), an architectural masterpiece famous for its columned buildings high on a terrace and a stairway adorned with friezes of subject peoples bringing tribute (see Figure 19.3). In 1914, English Colonel P. M. Sykes
scaled the stairway on his sixteen-hand horse and was overwhelmed by the view from the top. He had the place to himself. Today, you arrive in an air-conditioned bus and spend a tightly scheduled two hours in a fenced and controlled archaeological environment. The quality of the experience is completely different.
