The Patrimonialization and the Heritage Value of the Archaeological Record. Tierra del Fuego as a Case Study

Abstract

Heritage drives along a path that goes from nowadays toward the past, when somebody starts to recognize it and thus come back to the past looking forreferences that legitimize interests of the present. Then, heritage constitutes a speech, a narrative that joins values, interests, and ideologies as from concrete elements or goods gain sense. At present, an avoidable topic in those heritage activation processes is tourism. The explosive development of this activity hardly pushed and particularly based these kinds of processes from heritage. The increase in tourism promoted the interest for the voyages looking for the consumption of cultural goods. We present here four examples of archaeological/historical sites from Tierra del Fuego (Argentina), where tourism is one of the main industries.Scientific community, indigenous communities, Government actors, and tourismare presented as the best-involved social agents in heritage enhancements. Fromthese cases, we analyze the limits and difficulties to go ahead with the eritageactivation and its feasibility.