Sustainable Tourism and Its Role in Preserving Archaeological Sites

Abstract

Heritage and archaeological sites face many challenges that lead to the deterioration of their physical condition, thus declines its historical value. These challenges may be due to environmental conditions, inhabitants themselves, the authorities’ neglect of these sites’ maintenance and/or the increase of tourism. The concept of sustainable tourism has emerged as one of the foremost global tourism patterns at the present time for its clean method in preserving nature sites and balancing urban heritage by preserving its identity and landmarks and marketing it in a sustainable manner for tourism which benefits all parties involved in the tourism process. Being rich in many factors, Babylon Governorate is a great tourist attraction due to prior civilizations on its land and the Ancient City of Babylon, the many religious holy shrines, the abundance of its agricultural lands and the presence of the Euphrates River makes it eligible for all kinds of tourism especially archaeological tourism, if it is exploited in a sustainable way, it may be one of the most prominent destinations of local tourism. This research aims to determine the extent of the ability of sustainable tourism to revive ancient city of Babylon for tourism, by building a theoretical framework to describe the relationship between sustainable tourism and archaeological sites to create a set of strategies and apply them to the current reality of the archaeological city using description and analysis to measure the extent of its efficiency then end the research with concluding that the small percentage of adopting sustainable tourism mechanisms due to a number of administrative, social and technical obstacles, prevents the tourism industry from flourishing and benefiting from this vital resource.