If true historical scholarship is about linking the present to the past and impelling the reader to take action in the here and now, then Alicia Ebbitt McGill's book—a culmination of over 15 years of ethnographic research in Crooked Tree and Biscayne, two Kriol communities of north-central Belize—more than delivers. McGill argues that archaeology and education are intersecting and interconnected institutions through which both official heritage and vernacular heritage (which in McGill's conceptualization comprises local, tangible, and intangible cultural components that are shared by the community) are negotiated and contested. Alongside her deep understanding of the Crooked Tree and Biscayne communities, McGill also engages with British imperial archival sources, providing us with a glimpse into the past that is always in relation to the concerns of the present. In taking on the question of archaeology in Belize, McGill adds to conversations in public history around Maya archaeology begun in recent...
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