Museums and Archaeology

Museums, Heritage and Archaeology brings together a wide, but carefully-chosen, selection of literature from around the world that connects museums, heritage and archaeology. Part of the successful Leicester Readers in Museum Studies series, it provides a combination of issue- and practice-based perspectives. As such, it a volume not only for students and researchers from a range of disciplines interested in museum, gallery and heritage studies, including public archaeology and cultural resource management (CRM), but also the wide range of professionals and volunteers in the museum and heritage sector who work with archaeological collections.

The volume’s balance of theory and practice and its thematic and geographical breadth is explored and explained in an extended introduction, on ‘Museums, Heritage and Archaeology: Principles, Practice and Debates’. It situates the readings in the context of the extensive literature on public archaeology (archaeological heritage) and museum archaeology, highlighting the many tensions that exist between idealistic ‘principles’ and real-life ‘practice’ and the debates that surround these. The extended introduction, section introductions and the seminal pieces chosen by Robin Skeates create a comprehensive and contextualised introduction to the interplay of museums, heritage and archaeology.