HERITAGE VALUE: COMBINING CULTURE AND ECONOMICS

Dr John Carman is a leading figure in the field of Heritage Value and currently Senior Lecturer in Heritage Valuation in the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham. Anchored in his interrogation of how heritage value arises and is assigned - and lately ideas of ownership and property - he has pursued his wide-ranging research interests in historic battlefields, memory, public archaeology, and the notion of "the public" and museums in international contexts. His significance and standing in the field of heritage value is confirmed most recently by a biographical entry in the Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (Springer 2013).
His PhD - awarded in 1993 from Cambridge University - was the first full length study of the relationship between value and law as it relates to the archaeological heritage; it was published by Leicester University Press as Valuing Ancient Things: archaeology and law in 1996. Other publications include Archaeology and Heritage (Continuum 2002) which includes an extensive and detailed discussion of the value schemes currently being applied to the archaeological heritage worldwide; and Against Cultural Property (Duckworth 2005) which offers a radical approach to considering heritage as an object of property relations grounded in a concern with value, drawing especially on ideas from Institutional Economics (Ostrom 1990; Eggertson 1990). He has collaborated with economists and those in Business Studies on advocating a non-accounting model to the value of heritage and is presently writing a book for CUP on the global practice of Archaeological Resource Management that has valuation of archaeological materials as a core theme.