Prehistory and landscapes of heritage in modern Wales

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Abstract

Contemporary Welsh identities are bound up in articulations of the distant past such that the Iron Age and associated commodified celtic cultural package are foregrounded in constructions of heritage and landscape in Wales. Guidebooks to Wales explicitly tie place and past through the juxtaposition of image and word. With the growth of the heritage industry in the latter part of the 20th century the construction and re-construction of specific images of the past in museums and heritage "experiences', images often taken from the texts of tourism, affect how we understand place and community, adding further layers of meaning. The new Celtica centre in Machynlleth, Castell Henllys Iron Age hillfort in Pembrokeshire, and the celtic village at the Museum of Welsh Life, St. Fagans all construct different prehistories. In so doing they structure and articulate Place. Their spatialisation of contemporary politics, implicated in the representation of contingent, contested pasts in turn spatialises cultural identity. The movement through such heritage attractions writes a certain historic specificity or, rather, non-specificity onto the body. These places can thus be understood as the performative spcaes in which we enact rituals to cement our own cultural identities, whether Welsh or not. -Author
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)37-47
Number of pages0
JournalSwansea Geographer
Volume32
Issue number0
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 1995

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