I used to travel a lot, and I have been on many 1-, 2-, 3-hour long tours, in various places in the world, where the tour guide essentially narrates the entire history of the area. It can be extremely informative and fascinating to learn history from a passionate local.
What sort of interaction does the academic historian community have with these tour guides and their parent companies? Do you fact check them? Do they consult you? Do you learn from each other at all? Is there a mutual respect between you, mutual disdain or just don't care?
Let me tell you about the circus that is Salem, MA tourism and 'history'. There are some good tour guides and attractions, but it is overwhelmed by sensationalists trying to capitalize on a tragedy. I am currently a graduate student in history and an expert of the Salem Witch Trials. I also spent several summers working at one of the better sites. I worked in a historic home that belonged to Judge Jonathan Corwin. Its a cool museum although you get more out of it when you talk to the guides since our staff was generally better informed than local tour companies. The House often had scholars visiting, our manager was friends with many academic experts on Salem history, held lectures throughout the year, we kept a library for staff members to reference, and sold authoritative books in the gift shop. There can be great partnerships between tourism and academia.
However, do not visit Salem in October if you want to learn anything. If you want to go to Halloween parties and drink, Salem is a great place in October, but facts quickly disappear. Local historians annually beg the city to regulate tourist activity in the 17th century cemetery, and they do restrict access to a certain number at a time, but so many tourists litter, touch, and sit on gravestones. It is the stuff of preservationist, archivists, and historian nightmares. There are also certain tour companies that blatantly spread false information. The worst offender is the Witch "History" "Museum" and their partner attractions. There is an "exhibit" that credits the ghost of Giles Corey with starting the 1914 Salem fire. I wish that were the most absurd claim in the building.
There is also the entire issue of modern witches treating Salem as a Mecca. 17th century witches and modern witches are entirely different and there is no relationship. One place- the Salem Witch Museum- includes an exhibit on the changing definitions of witches that clarifies those questions. However, some tour companies, usually held by modern witches, conflate the ideas. Laurie Cabot bringing witches to Salem in the 1970s led to her claiming those executed in Salem were the same as her religious group. Its a mess that tour guides rarely clarify and leads tourists to imagine all sorts of things about the Puritan colonists that aren't true. I once had a local tell me I could learn a lot from Cabot because she knows everything about the witch trials (she doesn't). Also, Cabot offers potion and spell classes for $250 each. While I'm sure she and her followers hold some religious beliefs, they certainly make a nice profit from spinning tales about Salem history without consulting academic interpretations.
I've even had other tour guides go through my tours and ask questions. One woman from a tour company in Boston asked about trials that occurred in the House (a long misconception from 19th century claims but fairly corrected now by most tour guides), and when I corrected the misconception and explained how it came about, she told me "Well that's not what I tell my tourists." We have the home of the judge where arrest warrants were probably written, we don't need to sensationalize the House more. I was shocked that this guide knew my academic background in the subject, was visiting the site I work at, and asked for information, but still refused to accept the correct information.
TLDR: It depends on your tour guide in Salem. Some are great. Some are awful and spread absurd stories despite access to real information.
I work at the archaeological site of Tiwanaku, "Spiritual and political center of the Tiwanaku Culture." I also work at the tourist site of Tiwanaku, "One of the most mysterious ancient ruins in South America."
The UNESCO and TripAdvior taglines are clearly at odds, yet neither the thousands of pages written about Tiwanaku nor the dozens of years of excavations at the site are likely to change its presentation. Take a peak at the language in the advertisements: "uncover the ancient mysteries," "mysterious disappearance," "mysterious circumstances," "lost in time." Even the basic dates are often wrong. One tour touts the "15,000 year old" complexes, a date drawn from the writings of racist 1910s imperialist- and then exaggerated. A 10-day tour of Peru and Bolivia promises to share the 1000s of years of Inca history- even though the Inca empire as we know it only lasted 150 some years.
Statements I've overheard from tour guides include:
These rocks were cut with diamonds
These rocks were too hard to cut with diamonds
These rocks were cut with metal saws
These builders didn't know what metal was
These rocks were cut with water
Cutting rocks with water is a silly idea.
These rocks are all fake reconstructions
So what's going on here?
The majority of the tours at the site are operated by independent companies stationed in the nearby Bolivian capital La Paz. Compared to neighboring Peru, Bolivia's tourist infrastructure is limited, and these companies offer day-long, all-inclusive trips out of the city. These companies are generally ignorant of the site's significance to modern indigenous groups and of the history of archaeological excavations there. They tailor experiences to the expectations of European travelers and of tourists from Peru, Argentina, or other Bolivian cities. They are also able to maintain their control due to the poor to non-existent signage at the site.
This has been problematic for modern Tiwanaku residents. Since the collapse of the Tiwanaku state, there has always been some kind of occupation on the site. The modern town originates from an Inca bureaucratic outpost which was co-opted by Spanish conquistadors and turned into the economics and social center for surrounding indigenous Aymara communities. On weekends and afternoons, the town is busy with people attending school, visiting the church, selling in the market, playing soccer, or just having lunch. At night, people return to their houses in the surrounding rural hamlets. Those who live in the city are vecinos, "neighbors," and those who live in the rural communities are campesinos, though these terms have become less common. Nevertheless, the entire community maintain a strong connection to the site and rightfully assert it as their own. But they did not always have that privilege.
During the 1990s, the site of Tiwanaku was controlled by the Dirección Nacional de Arqueología y Antropología (DINAAR), a federal office headquartered in La Paz. As is still the case today, the site generates most of its revenue from ticket sales. That money went to DINAAR and left local communities with the meager profits from hotels (which people don't stay in because of the mentioned day-tripe model) and from restaurants (only a few of which are standard on tour itineraries). Like much of the world in the '90s, however, Bolivia saw a trend towards decentralization and neoliberalism, especially after the passage of the "Law of Popular Participation" in 1996.
The Tiwanaku junta de vecinos, basically the city council, and the mallkus, or mayors, of nearby communities saw the potential in this trend. On August 6th (Bolivian Independence Day) of 2000, a group of them showed up at the site entrance to overthrow DINAAR control. Their weapons? Tickets, record books, and a set of keys demanded from the site supervisor, also a Tiwanaku resident. They set up their own ticket booth, opened the site for tourists at 9 AM as usual, and continued to occupy the site for the next several weeks. Clare Sammells, who was fortuitously doing ethnographic work in the town at the time and whose account of the events I base this on, notes that tourists she talked did not know anything was happening. That was the goal, of course. Neither the junta nor DINAAR wanted to miss out on tourist revenue.
After more some formal discussions, DINAAR officially handed over control of the site to the municipality. The transition was not smooth. DINAAR still wanted to handle excavation permits and reserved the right to audit site operations. Tension emerged between vecinos and campesinos as to how income would be distributed and who would have say in the direction of site management.^1
Why tell this story to answer your question?
"Who gets to tell history to tourists" is an incredibly complicated question before academics or tour companies get involved, even within a single site.
Tour companies, in this situation, are just one of many players in the complex politics surrounding historical sites. Though they depend on the preservation of the site and are at least superficially invested in further research, their goals are exclusively profit oriented. To academics and site owners, they are no less visitors than the tourists they bring.
That said, local, "official" guides do exist at Tiwanaku, hired and trained by CIAAAT and with their own union. Though achieving any kind of ban on other tour operators would be impossible, they've successfully fought to make sure all site guides get some form of certification. Once that certification is done, however, they're usually free to say whatever.
I should also distinguish between tour guides and other workers in the tourism industry. Visit any site in the Andes and you will see a line of women selling "artisan crafts" or wearing indigenous dress and offering to pose for photos, often with a llama in tow. Annelou Ypeij has done some great ethnographic work on these folks in Peru and Machu Picchu. They typically have some kind of union/guild-esque organization, but otherwise operate independently. While it's easy to see their costumes and cheap plastic figurines as a mock performance of tourist expecations, Ypeij convincingly argues that these "staged" identities can be valuable contributions to a community's "real identity."
Academics' main interaction with tour companies is one of critique. In situations like Tiwanaku, where there is not a tight, centrally controlled visitor experience, tour companies are the primary gatekeepers of historical knowledge. These companies are more often formed by people looking to make money off tourists than by those with any real connection or knowledge to a site. But, as the Tiwanaku situation demonstrates, what constitutes a "local" to a tourist is vastly simplified. This lends tour operators a misleading air of authenticity and propagate ideas such as those I listed- not just wrong ideas, but self- contradictory ones.
^1 Eighteen years later, the site is now under the independent jurisdiction of the Centro de Investigaciones Arqueologicas Antropologicas y Administracion de Tiwanaku (CIAAAT, not to be confused with CIAAT that controlled the site in the '60s). The current administration is headed by several actual archaeologists, and has been working closely with the junta de vecinos, local mallkus, and with foreign archaeologists like myself to vastly improve the visitor experience. Attracting visitors remains difficult. While talking with friends in La Paz, most tell me that they've visited Tiwanaku once on a school trip, but now see it as a tourist thing. Modern Aymara movements brought a supposedly authentic Winter Solstice ceremony to the site, which fills the modern town beyond physical capacity with visitors, but they also provoked a curious breed of nationalism and helped put President Evo Morales in office. Evo enacted a pricey visa requirement for all US visitors, which has drastically reduced the number of North American tourists. There's only so much we can do in this situation.
