“With a rhetoric of diversity, sustainability, and conservation, neoliberal forces typecast entire societies as both money-spinning tourist fodder and evil destroyers of pristine nature.  Meskell incisively exposes the resulting structural violence of conservation in South Africa, showing how managerial simplification of the country’s painful historical experience and complex archaeological record perpetuates past oppressions and exclusions.  The Nature of Heritage gives timely shape and heft to concern for the future of the past – and the future of humanity.”
- Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

“In one sense this is a book about the loss of innocence – of how the dream of cultural heritage in a new South Africa has been swamped by narrower interests and the tourism market.  But it also a reassertion of the value and significance of archaeological ethnography, of showing how ‘past-mastering’ is invariably the outcome of compromises, and imbued with politics.”
- Martin Hall, University of Salford