ABSTRACT
Archaeological heritage management of our times is normally based on four key tenets:
1 Archaeological sites and objects are authentic, in other words, of true antiquity, and have a distinctive aura which fakes and copies do not have. Safeguarding this authenticity and the aura of the original is the rationale of many museum collections and justification for preserving ancient sites in the landscape. In a famous article ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Walter Benjamin (1992) has given the notion of aura some philosophical grounding.
