This book offers a critique of the all pervasive Western notion that other communities often live in a timeless present. Who Needs the Past? provides first-hand evidence of the interest non-Western, non-academic communities have in the past.

List of contributors Foreword Preface Introduction The Heritage of Eurocentricity 1. The Western world view in archaeological atlases 2. Public presentations and private concerns: archaeology in the pages of National Geographic 3. American nationality and ethnicity in the depicted past 4. Afro-Americans in the Massachusetts historical landscape 5. Black people and museums: the Caribbean Heritage Project in Southampton 6. `Volk und Germanentum': the presentation of the past in Nazi Germany Rulers and Ruled 7. Maori control of the Maori heritage 8. Nga Tukemata: Nga Taonga o Ngati Kahungunu (The awakening: the treasures of Ngati Kahungunu) 9. God's police and damned whores: images of archaeology in Hawaii 10. Aborignial perceptions of the past: the implications for cultural resource management in Australia 11. Search for the missing link: archaeology and the public in Lebanon 12. The legacy of Eve 13. Museums: two case studies of reaction to colonialism Politics and Administration 14. Cultural education in West Africa: archaeological perspectives 15. The development of museums in Botswana: dilemmas and tensions in a front-line state 16. A past abandoned? Some experiences of a regional museum in Botswana 17. Archaeology and museum work in the Solomon Islands 18. Fifty years of conservation experience on Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Chile Archaeology and the People 19. Didactic presentations of the past: some retrospective considerations in relation to the Archaeological and Ethnographical Museum, Lodz, Poland 20. Reconstruction as interpretation: the example of the Jorvik Viking Centre, York 21. Fort Loudoun, Tennessee, a mid-18th century British fortification: a case study in research archaeology, reconstruction, and interpretive exhibits 22. Conservation and information in the display of prehistoric sites 23. The epic of the Ekpu: ancestor figures of Oron, south-east Nigeria Conclusion: archaeologists and others Index