Managing Archaeological Sites – Cultural Landscapes and Tourism

Often tourism is held up as the reason local populations should want to preserve an archaeological site.  But in some cases tourism has actually been the downfall of the archaeological site.  An interesting case is the Banaue Rice Terraces in the Philippines.  This post will look briefly at some of the things that were discussed in class concerning the protection, recognition, and management of cultural landscapes with regards to the affects tourism.

When should a landscape be set aside as a site to be protected?  UNESCO says that it should when it is demonstrated to have “outstanding universal value”.  But what does this mean?  Some of the criteria for a site to be declared of “outstanding universal value” are that it is a “masterpiece of human creative genius”, that it “becomes a unique (or at least an) exceptional testimony to a culture or tradition that is living or has disappeared”, that it is an “outstanding example of a type that illustrates significant history”, etc. 

The Banaue Rice Terraces in the Philippines were declared a “World Heritage Site” (although sites like Wikipedia claim that the rice terraces of Banaue were not actually included).  The Rice Terraces have been a source of pride for the Filipino people who sometimes even call it the “Eighth Wonder of the World”.  They are located primarily in the mountains of Ifugao where they are built into the side of the mountain (if you haven’t seen pictures I highly recommend googling them).   However, today they are almost all gone directly due to their receiving this designation.  What when wrong?

According to the story in our lecture, they are just one example of “World Heritage” status gone arye.  Apparently, when the status designation was explained to the local populace, they were given the impression that tourism would increase, which would be a good thing for them.  As tourist numbers did begin to increase the local village had a problem – there were no hotels for the tourists to stay in.  Local people opened their homes at first but soon industrious individuals began to build hotels.  Soon a local tourist infrastructure emerged.  The problem?  The local people found it to be easier to work in the tourist industry rather than on the rice terraces.  Where once they had to work it for food, now they had money from tourism to buy food.  As a result, the terraces fell into disrepair and have begun to erode at an alarming rate.  As the terraces began to disappear, so too did the tourists.

In this case (and others like it) tourism was not a blessing but a plague.

This case is not an isolated one.  Angkor Wat and other sites have faced similar issues.  Thus, when preparing to manage a site, it is important to think through the problems that might arise from the increase in tourism so that problems like the one in the Philippines can be avoided.