Paper short abstract:

Heritage landscapes of Britain, as sacred sites, may be seen as places of ancestors. How are 'ancestors' expressed within truth claims of pagans and other spiritual visitors, heritage management, or forms of site development, and what are the implications of calls for reburial of those ancestors?

Paper long abstract:

Britain's wealth of prehistoric sites attracts visitors world-wide: for some, archaeological sites and artefacts consisting of burial mounds, stone circles and other human-made features, alongside such natural features as groves of trees, rivers and hills, comprise sacred sites in sacred landscapes. The Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Right Project (www.sacredsites.org.uk) examines contemporary pagan engagements with the past. Pagans look to ancient religions of northwest Europe and indigenous religions in order to reconstruct spiritualities and so re-enchant the present. Spiritual tourists arrive from all over the world, mixing with more local new-indigenous 'visitors', and making pilgrimages to these places where spirits, gods and goddesses, ancestors and 'wights' can be engaged with, dialogue established, offerings made, and ritual conducted, all with implications for anthropologists, archaeologists, heritage managers and the tourist industry. Sacred sites become contested, heterotopic spaces.

In this paper we focus on tensions between sites as sacred places of ancestors and as locations for (often lucrative) heritage tourism, through examining the recent development of a British reburial issue. Pagans interested in site and ancestor welfare are increasingly campaigning for the reburial of pagan human remains held in museum and university collections, and express concern for welfare of remains found during, for instance, rescue archaeology. The founding of HAD (Honouring the Ancient Dead) and a 2006 conference at the Manchester Museum indicate this as a burgeoning issue. Our discussion attends to issues of identity formation and spirituality in relation to the concept of 'ancestors' in the landscape - increasingly central to heritage/spiritual tourism, differently mobilised in truth claims about the past made by some pagans, dismissed by some 'scientific' accounts yet employed in attempts to resist encroachments from road building or quarrying - and to the power relations surrounding these contested spaces.

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