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This chapter examines the role of heritage as a means of empowering destination communities and providing deeper and more meaningful encounters between tourists and their destination, which contributes to the notion of Destination Conscience by highlighting more sustainable and humane ways of ‘doing’ tourism and opening places up to greater community involvement and access by visitors. This includes heritage concepts such as Indigenous communities, local spirituality and religious traditions, public archaeology and ordinary heritage, and how these translate into deeper engagement between residents and tourists, community empowerment and a more creative and holistic tourist experiences. Conceptually, this chapter highlights notions of empowerment, tourists' experiences and Destination Conscience.

This paper is concerned with identifying and discussing how archaeologists may have engendered the past in unintended ways and produced versions of social relations that, in the course of searching for antagonistic gender relations, project our own (feminist) desires of equality, autonomy, and agency onto past societies. It is proposed that an adequate recognition of the different dimensions of gender may help us to differentiate cultural understandings of gender from the ideological use of gender categories to establish hierarchical social relations.

This article focuses on humanities scholars’ information searching. David Ellis’ model of scholars’ information seeking is taking as a starting point for this study. For understanding the information needs and information seeking habits of humanities scholars, it is crucial to know about the nature of research processes within diverse humanities fields. The study at hand, therefore, starts from the premise that the information searching of humanistic researchers needs to be understood within the framework of the research process, and not as a phenomenon outside of it.

Based on 24 in-depth interviews in archaeology, art history, philosophy, and languages and linguistics, the article examines humanities scholars’ research processes. The purpose of this study is to analyse the research processes, their course and different stages, and to classify these into types. The purpose is also to examine the relationships between the types of research processes and the disciplines studied. Seven types of research processes were identified among scholars working in the fields studied. The types were named the Fly, the Sphinx Moth, the Mole, the Mockingbird, and the Spider.

The findings show that the representatives of a specific humanities discipline did not always proceed in their research in similar ways. There were distinct differences according to discipline, but important differences between scholars belonging to the same discipline could also be observed. The findings indicate that information seeking behaviour cannot be explained by factors that lie outside the researcher and the researcher's subject matter. Another important finding is that humanistic research often does not proceed in linear stages. There is more variability within the research and searching processes within humanities and among representatives of specific disciplines than is often presumed.

The aim of this chapter is to consider the socially responsible aspects generally hidden from researchers by considering examples in the fields of archaeology and restoration of cultural and historical places and objects. This chapter is written as a result of practical efforts taken by the first author in the field of restoration through laboratory research and represents findings from experience. The main finding of the research is that the reality of social responsibility has been lost in its defining and needs to be actually observed in practice. This chapter has been written according to research undertaken in Iran as a historical country. More general applications can be developed. The chapter uses the field of archaeology and restoration to take into consideration social responsibility and shows the more general implications of the approach taken. In doing so, it shows the relevance of social responsibility to all walks of life. This chapter is the result of years of practice in the field of restoration and sustainability, and the combined approach taken is unique.

Relationships between long-distance exchange, especially of luxury goods, and the centralization of political power represent a fundamental dimension of political and economic organization. Precolumbian American societies, outside familiar European contexts that have shaped analytical perspectives, provide a broadened comparative field with the potential for more nuanced analysis.

Analysis focuses on four cases that vary in political centralization, institutional complexity, and geographic scale: Ulúa societies without political centralization; small Maya states; Aztec; and Inka empires. Emphasis on relationships between principals and agents highlights the potential of social practices to perform the functions often associated with state institutions

In the Ulúa region, commerce flourished in the absence of states and their concomitants. The very wealth of Ulúa societies and the unusually broad dispersion of prosperity across social segments impeded the development of states by limiting the ability of local lords to intensify their status and convert it to political power. Intensity of market activity and long-distance exchange does not correlate well with the florescence of states. Less centralized and non-centralized political systems may in fact facilitate mercantile activity (or impede it less) in comparison with states.

These cases frame a useful perspective on the organizational configuration of long-distance trade. Informal social mechanisms and practices can be an alternative to state institutions in structuring complex economic relations. The implications for understanding trajectories of societal change are clear: the development of states and centralized political organization is not a prerequisite for robust long-distance commerce.

Conserving, creating, and communicating effectively the complex image of a particular touristic area represents an important challenge that global market imposes on planners. Art and architecture can contribute to this challenge as they provide significant interactions and transactions among different sectors. Planning able to valorize patrimony and to read and to interpret cultural heritage is needed. New ways of collaboration need to be established among different fields of science, in order to develop, communicate, and experiment with a new language aimed at people from different backgrounds. The main theme in the “Archaeology and Synesthesy” project is to devise new method for the bringing to life of cultural heritage through participants’ senses.