Over the last 30 years, archaeologists and heritage managers have developed reflective, ethical practices and methods to take into account the relationships “local” communities have with the
archaeological sites that they live near and among and/or to which they lay spiritual, ethnic, or other cultural claim. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, during the height of postmodern critique, practitioners began designing projects that aimed to gain specific insights into how people use the material past to construct, perform, and maintain distinctive, “local” identities in an increasingly globalized world, the ways in which they contest, appropriate, and negotiate political and economic interests in relation to tourism and heritage management policies, as well as how they situate their pasts in relation to “world” history and human origins. As a result, the integration of “local” concerns, values, and beliefs became a routine part of heritage management practices, not only at United Nations Economic Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites (WHS) but also more widely at regional, local, and grassroots levels.