ABSTRACT
The valley of the river Boyne, in the East of Ireland, is considered prime agricultural land with a highly competitive mixed farming regime and a dispersed population. Since the 1970s, it has formed part of a commuter belt for the city of Dublin. Another way of assessing the relationships is to look at a specific example of commodification in a heritage landscape with a critical archaeological eye. The invention of tradition, the active and passive contribution of intellectuals, the objectification of those who are traditionalized as ‘natural’, ‘distinctive’, ‘exotic’ or ‘Other’, the appropriation of tradition by the dominant and the subjugated is well discussed already. The neo-traditionalism exposed by an archaeology of signposts sets up a particular series of relations between modernity and monumentality. It exposes the value of the monuments in the Boyne valley as ‘world heritage’ or as ‘prehistory of the nation’ in competition with other unique commodity-pasts such as Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt.
