Education beyond Preservation: An Archaeological Camp for Girls in Armenia.

At least since the nineteenth century, preservation has provided the primary justification for educating the public about archaeology and heritage, an outgrowth of liberalism's concern to cultivate good citizens (Bennett 1995 ; Smith 2006). In the United States, the turn to education as an indirect strategy of site preservation began in earnest in the 1970s, as expanding postwar development and the growth of the antiquities market threatened heritage resources (Wylie 2005 : 50). The 1988 amendment to the US Archaeological Resource Protection Act mandated that federal agencies establish public education programs for the express purpose of protecting heritage resources (Franklin and Moe 2012 : 572; Little 2012 : 400). Still today, preservation prevails as the dominant rationale for archaeological education, as enshrined in Principle 4 of the Society for American Archaeology's Principles of Archaeological Ethics. Nick Merriman (2004 : 5) calls this the "deficit model" of archaeological education. The premise is that the public lacks the knowledge necessary to safeguard heritage assets, and that the greater their "archaeological literacy" the better stewards they will be of collective heritage resources (Franklin and Moe 2012). The "deficit model" of archaeological education serves to benefit the archaeological profession and wider heritage apparatus, forging a public that shares practitioners' values and that will be compliant with cultural resource regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]