ABSTRACT
In the present chapter, I build upon the discussion developed in this volume with regard to land ownership and its use and effectiveness as an analytical tool in archaeological discourse, but I also reframe the foregoing question by treating the past itself as a ‘virtual territory’, in other words, a place “where the imaginary meets the real” (Bartle 2003: 1; see also Hodder 1999a: 183). The aim of this enterprise will be to highlight two issues in particular: first, that rights and claims on the past have always been territorial in nature and second, that they constitute a product of the intersection between capitalist socio-economic structures and the agenda(s) of Western history and archaeology, from their very establishment as scientific disciplines up until present day. By setting this spatial metaphor as my point of departure, what I seek to exemplify, therefore, is why it is essential to shift the debate concerning our ways of dwelling in the past into the broader fields of political geography, ethics and critical theory (Agnew 1997; Gathercole and Lowenthal 1989; Harrison 2008; Harvey 1989; 1996; Painter 1995; Sack 1986; Taylor and Flint 2007).
