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Recent attempts to include and assess public heritage in the accounts of governments and charities are controversial. There are many kinds of value, not merely financial, and various measurement bases. This chapter examines why and how we account (if at all) for heritage assets bringing out the surrounding controversy. Is public heritage an asset that should be included in the reported wealth of public bodies and nations? The economic valuation methods, revealed preferences and stated preferences are the economic valuation methods investigated and considered in relation to the decisions to be made on public heritage. Although the conceptual and practical problems surrounding valuation and reporting of public heritage are immense, pragmatic solutions should be sought. Multidisciplinary approaches are necessary to make informed decisions on management, financing, and the allocation of resources for public heritage.

This chapter explores the contemporary significance of agricultural heritage, a concept in which the largely cultural and societal concerns for heritage preservation are shuffled into those related to nature conservation and the development of agriculture. Both heritage preservation and nature conservation cast mutually constitutive and relatively fixed ideas of past nature and culture into present and future. Agriculture, too, arrives heavily burdened with inherited meaning, as historically and materially it is “Exhibit A” in the powerful modern narrative of “Culture” gradually rising over “Nature.” In this context, agricultural heritage is almost automatically cast as a relic of the past ways of traditional peoples and their less efficient, less useful, pre-Modern natures. This chapter suggests instead that agricultural heritage represents one of humankind’s richest bodies of environmental experience and most successful manners of conveying knowledge through time, providing material examples of alternative knowledge of nature itself.

Australia has myriad rock art places that have special significance to their many Indigenous owners and a heritage resource of outstanding universal value to all humankind. The appropriate management of those places involves particular heritage considerations because of the multiple layers of significance at stake. The Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act of 1999, a federal instrument, defines the criteria for the recognition of national heritage values and forms the basis for identifying the most significant natural and cultural heritage places in Australia. This chapter provides a research-based management logic for including significant rock art places on Australia’s National Heritage List. This thematic approach, founded on current Australian rock art research, recognizes the thematic structure adopted by UNESCO in its assessment of World Heritage Outstanding Universal Values, since there are logical synergies for synchronizing Australia’s National Heritage List with World Heritage Listing.

The aim of this chapter is to review basic components and procedures regarding rock art conservation and management for archaeologists and anybody else who may be interested in such endeavours. Rock art considered relevant to this chapter includes iconographic pictures, ‘abstract’ designs, and any other artificial discernable markings placed on rock surfaces (including sideward-facing vertical cliffs, cave walls, downward-facing ceilings, side- and upward-facing boulders [either natural or placed there by people], and upward-facing horizontal bedrock pavements). This chapter emphasizes that proper knowledge of and experience in working with rock art in any particular area is essential when recording, conserving, managing, and interpreting it. Proper identification, knowledge, and recording of rock art include various scales of observation, ranging from the macro-landscape scale to the micro-scale of rock surface stratigraphy. Coming up with practical solutions requires a working knowledge of both the physical sciences and the humanities.

This chapter considers community conflicts arising over the aesthetic character of homes when advocates use government policies and regulations to impose historic preservation values. Historic preservation is organized as a cosmology that values and seeks to restore original architectural forms as representations of history. Homeowner advocates for preservation are motivated by their own home restoration experiences with material agency, while local municipalities employ “aesthetic governmentality” techniques with graphic codes to help shape homeowner perceptions and change aesthetic norms. Conflicts in two southern California cities illustrate how preservationist residents use regulations to actively protect houses against remodels by “uninformed” homeowners. In another city, affluent Chinese immigrants propose mansion-sized remodels of bungalow houses as a counter aesthetic to preservation. Each aesthetic promotes a distinct but also contrasting moral suburban landscape.

This chapter traces the gestation of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention and the rise of the World Heritage title to a global brand and major catalyst for heritage aspirations, activities, and discourses. Despite conceptual reforms in the 1990s and a more nation-centered mode of World Heritage Committee operations since 2010, Northern dominance and biases persist. Global co-custodianship of sites has remained largely symbolic and the contribution of World Heritage to international cooperation and site conservation is uneven. World Heritage has clearly broadened conceptions of cultural heritage, even if inconsistently. Social effects of site designation tend to be complex, producing both winners and losers on the local level, with external actors extending their influence. Recent financial difficulties make ambitious change unlikely for the coming years. The power of the World Heritage title is increasingly at the mercy of the treaty states’ internal conditions, rather than of the global institutional framework.

Questions of legal and cultural rights over rock art are particularly compelling given the very different significance the art holds for Indigenous people compared to that recognized by a more general public. In the past, conflicts have arisen between the interests of the Indigenous people and those of the nation state, or of non-Indigenous mining or tourism ventures. This chapter examines the legal rights that Indigenous people have to rock art sites on their land, as well as legal issues arising over the ownership and reproduction of rock art. It examines intellectual property law, including copyright, trade marks, and breach of confidence laws, as well as cultural heritage protection laws. Finally, it considers some of the broader cultural and ethical issues raised by non-Indigenous use of rock art imagery.

This article criticizes the reduction of Cultural Heritages to Cultural Capital or Cultural Commons. Whereas economists usually reduce heritages to their capital aspects (standard capital for equipment, human and social capital, natural capital, and cultural capital) or to their commons aspects (stock of resources managed by a community), we consider the components of Cultural Heritages (CH) to carry different (and generally intertwined) dimensions that prevent abstraction of the non-economic dimensions of heritages when analyzing their economic dimension. Rather than dodging the question of their multi-dimensionality, we use it as our starting point in explaining the debates about how these heritages should be defined and managed, and the necessity of considering the differing points of view and interests (both material and symbolic) of the various stakeholders.

This article is concerned with caring for place, the interweaving of community, landscape, and culture. Culturally reflexive stewardship (crs) involves actions to sustain a way of life, motivated by a shared appreciation of place, landscape, and region, and expressed through practices that transmit cultural knowledge and affirm a social identity. The article first contrasts two resource regimes, one based on a logic of tradeoffs and markets, the other on a logic of stewardship. Second, it presents the key characteristics of crs, emphasizing the linkage of intellectual content (local knowledge) with an ethical imperative based in the symbolic qualities of place. Finally, the article explores the relationship of stewardship to social organization, and offers examples of crs in three modes, termed “living in place,” “conservation and recovery,” and “polarization and protest.”

This chapter argues that critical heritage studies needs to consider not only what culture and heritage says about a place or space, but also what kinds of future possibilities and potentialities (becoming) are produced. This involves a thorough understanding about how time works in the narratives that heritage studies develop around a place. Narratives here are imagined as assemblages of signs, symbols, practices, and institutions. Using a case study of Cornwall in the South-West of the United Kingdom, the chapter considers how assembled narratives of Cornwall impact how the region is perceived and the effects that this has on future economic development.

Human beings’ unique drive to immortalize the important lessons we have learned is as old as civilization itself. The drive to pass on our cultural heritage to those we are more immediately temporally linked to, and those that we are more distantly temporally linked to, must then, serve an adaptive function. For animals as socially determined as humans, public heritage, through its reciprocal relationship with collective memory, supports the development of social cohesion between individuals, and therefore allows us to coalesce into groups and societies. How is this achieved? This chapter will focus on evidence that suggests what makes it into, or out of, our public heritage is about the functional role that information plays in shaping collective identity, not its validity, and will be determined by the extended interactional dynamics of the situation. Specifically, we focus on the role that conversational dynamics play in the formation of collective memories.

This chapter addresses three interconnected topics, beginning with a short overview of the archaeology of children and childhood in Italy, explaining how and why the Italian contribution to the topic has been very recent. The chapter then moves on to explore the relationship between modern children, Italian scholars of ancient history of art and archaeology, and museums; it notes that for a very long time Italian universities and museums have not been interested in developing didactic archaeology at all, especially when the spectators were children, whether of pre-school or older age. Finally, returning to children in the past, two noteworthy case studies of the presentation of ancient children at exhibitions are illustrated as an interesting point of convergence between current archaeological studies in Italy on childhood in the ancient world, and the newly generated need to communicate to the general public the result of research works.

In 1998, archaeologists discovered the first of sixteen Roman shipwrecks at San Rossore, Pisa, 500 m from the leaning tower. Shortly afterward a grand vision for a “museum with three vertices” was articulated: a public excavation area plus a conservation laboratory and museum of Mediterranean navigation, to be constructed in an under-used sixteenth-century barracks nearby. The grand vision of three interconnected institutions became an obstacle in itself: in the absence of an administrative culture that was able to bring projects “down to earth,” the universalist and utopian tendencies of professional discourse fostered a tendency to choose the “best” project over the most feasible one, adding costs, risks, and uncertainty to an already challenging project. Based on extensive archival research, this chapter reconstructs the fifteen-year history of the project and explores the emergent management issues at this unique site, including the role of professional optimism, bureaucratic myopia, urban planning, and uncertainty.

To date the field of heritage politics has primarily focused its attention on contestation, enmity, and destruction. This chapter looks at the politics of cooperation. It identifies themes and questions that arise if we examine cooperation as an inherently political process, and focuses on the ways in which knowledge production around heritage comes to be shaped through international relations, geopolitics, and international trade. China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is offered as an illustrative example. As we shall see, new heritage assemblages and cooperative structures are emerging across the Asia Pacific as a Silk Roads heritage industry forms to advance trade and diplomatic relations in the twenty-first century.

This chapter discusses a new approach to the study of urban place, “the scenes approach.” While this approach is not exclusively applicable to cities, this chapter is focused on urban areas. Businesses and institutions, people and practices join to produce areas with distinct aesthetics—hip, edgy, refined, glamorous, etc. These qualities make it possible to move about a city as if it were a scenic route, to discover the styles of life each has to offer. This chapter is intended as a first effort to extend scenes thinking to historic preservation and public heritage practice (and vice versa) and we invite critical dialogue and collaboration.

This chapter argues for a new perspective on heritage, one that is informed by the contexts of remaking. Traditionally, heritage has referred to specific types of architectural, material, and cultural forms and processes that carry with them a sense of monumentality. This writing argues for a new sense of heritage that takes into account the dynamic processes of the contemporary world. A series of five heritage metaphors (and their replacement metaphors) is considered in terms of the main premises of heritage as a cultural and political process. These include the tree (rhizome), battery (Rube Goldberg machine), monument (souvenir), lecture (dialogue), and library (open source). These metaphors are considered through a variety of heritage spaces in the world, including Castle of Matrera, the fresco of Christ in Borja, the Denver International Airport, the Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Monument, O. M. Henrikson Poplar Trees Mall, the Bodie ghost town, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and the World Data Archive..

This chapter explores the potential of intergenerational learning (IGL) occurring in communities around the globe to contribute to cultural conservation and cultural transformation. It builds on recent developments in theory and research to explore IGL as a mechanism for building and transforming cultural heritage between children and older adults. The benefits of IGL programs for both individual and community well-being are discussed, as well as the ability of IGL projects to foster social integration and acceptance in multicultural and diverse communities. The chapter makes a strong case for the integration of IGL programs within societies, especially migrant communities, to preserve and transform cultural heritage and build intercultural communities, for the benefit of all.

The field of cultural heritage is no longer solely dependent on the expertise of art and architectural historians, archaeologists, conservators, curators, and site and museum administrators. It has dramatically expanded across disciplinary boundaries and social contexts and now includes vernacular architecture, intangible cultural practices, knowledge, and language, performances, and rituals, as well as cultural landscapes. Heritage has become entangled with the broader social, political, and economic contexts in which heritage is created, managed, transmitted, protected, or destroyed. Heritage protection now encompasses a growing set of methodological approaches whose objectives are not necessarily focused upon the maintenance of material fabric, traditionally cultural heritage’s primary concern. Rather, these objectives have become explicitly social with methods foregrounding public engagement, diverse values, and community-based action. Thus, we introduce the term “public heritage” as a way of bringing together these emerging practices. This handbook charts major sites of convergence between the humanities and the social sciences—where new disciplinary perspectives are being brought to bear on public heritage. This introduction outlines the potential contributions of development studies, political science, anthropology, management studies, human geography, ecology, psychology, sociology, cognitive studies, and education to the field of public heritage.

This chapter addresses issues related to light–object interaction along with its resulting phenomena, taking into consideration materiality issues. It presents light and its role in artefacts studies, either as a tool for finds analysis or as a corrosion agent. It attempts a balanced investigation into past and contemporary approaches towards light from the conservator’s perspective. It discusses traditional raking and oblique light examination, along with its advanced digital analogue, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), which bridges the gap between digital photography and three-dimensional modelling. Applications of dome and/or Highlight RTI in a wide variety of material and artefact types, as well as in a wide range of conservation states, using macroscopic and microscopic means, indicate that the technique contributes considerably in prevention, investigation, examination and analysis, documentation, communication, dissemination, and presentation, as well as being a conservation monitoring tool.