Technological requirements for solutions in the conservation and protection of historic monuments and archaeological remains

Executive summary: This Study has discovered many achievements associated with European support for scientific and technological research for the protection and conservation of cultural heritage. The achievements to date are: 1. Creation of an active research community 2. A body of research of unparalleled and enviable international quality and character 3. Ongoing effectiveness of research beyond initial funding 4. Substantial rate of publication 5. Imaginative tools of dissemination and publication 6. Clear spin-offs and contribution to European competitiveness often going outside the European cultural heritage area 7. Contribution to emerging European legislation, for example, air quality management. The Study has also uncovered important research gaps associated with this field that have yet to begin to be investigated. It has also discovered the need for continuing fine scale advancement in areas where researchers have been active for a number of years. The overall picture is that European research in the field of cultural heritage protection must be put on a secure footing if it is to maintain its commanding lead over other regions of the world. This Study concludes that: 1. It would be invidious to attempt to separate basic and applied research in this area of research. Like any other scientific endeavour, this field needs to integrate basic and applied research if it is to continue to thrive. 2. Small, flexible, focused interdisciplinary teams responsive to European needs, must be sustained, promoted and celebrated as models of sustainability and that what is proposed under the European Research Area (ERA) for large and complex research projects, could inflict serious damage on this area of research. 3. Resources cannot be delegated to Member States because of the interdisciplinary nature of cultural heritage and the need for a co-ordinated pan-European perspective across this research that helps to define the essential character of European cultural heritage. National programmes only serve local needs, leading to loss of strategic output, lessening of competitiveness and risk of duplication. 4. A mechanism needs to be created to help researchers working in this field to communicate and exchange information with related sectors such as construction, urban regeneration, land reclamation and agriculture. 5. There is overwhelming agreement over the need for sustainable research funding for cultural heritage and for an iterative process of exchange among researchers, decision-makers and end-users in order to maximize benefits from project inception through to dissemination, audit and review. For all the reasons mentioned above, the most significant recommendation in this Report is the identification of the need for a European Panel on the Application of Science for Cultural Heritage (EPASCH)

Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Guiding Principles

Provides guidance on integrating recording, documentation, and information management of territories, sites, groups of buildings, or monuments into the conservation process; evaluating proposals; consulting specialists; and controlling implementation

Rights or containment? The politics of Aboriginal cultural heritage in Victoria

Aboriginal cultural heritage protection, and the legislative regimes that underpin it, constitute important mechanisms for Aboriginal people to assert their rights and responsibilities. This is especially so in Victoria, where legislation vests wide-ranging powers and control of cultural heritage with Aboriginal communities. However, the politics of cultural heritage, including its institutionalisation as a scientific body of knowledge within the state, can also result in a powerful limiting of Aboriginal rights and responsibilities. This paper examines the politics of cultural heritage through a case study of a small forest in north-west Victoria. Here, a dispute about logging has pivoted around differing conceptualisations of Aboriginal cultural heritage values and their management. Cultural heritage, in this case, is both a powerful tool for the assertion of Aboriginal rights and interests, but simultaneously a set of boundaries within which the state operates to limit and manage the challenge those assertions pose. The paper will argue that Aboriginal cultural heritage is a politically contested and shifting domain structured around Aboriginal law and politics, Australian statute and the legacy of colonial history

TRAVEL, CULTURAL TOURISM AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT. THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE TABULA PEUTINGERIANA

ROMIT PROJECT, www.romit.or

Heritage and Resilience: Issues and Opportunities for Reducing Disaster Risks

This paper examines the unique role of cultural heritage in disaster risk reduction. Itintroduces various approaches to protect heritage from irreplaceable loss and considers ways to draw upon heritage as an asset in building the resilience of communities and nations to disasters. The paper proposes ways forward and builds on the current momentum provided by the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters” (HFA) and the advancement of a post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction (HFA2) and the post-2015 development agenda. Cultural heritage is often associated with grandiose monuments and iconic archaeological sites that can hold us in awe of their beauty, history and sheer scale. However, the understanding of cultural heritage has undergone a marked shift during the last few decades in terms of what it is, why it is important, why it is at risk and what can be done to protect it. Cultural heritage today encompasses a broader array of places such as historic cities, living cultural landscapes, gardens or sacred forests and mountains, technological or industrial achievements in the recent past and even sites associated with painful memories and war. Collections of movable and immoveable items within sites, museums, historic properties and archives have also increased significantly in scope, testifying not only to the lifestyles of royalty and the achievements of great artists, but also to the everyday lives of ordinary people. At the same time intangibles such as knowledge, beliefs and value systems are fundamental aspects of heritage that have a powerful influence on people’s daily choices and behaviors. Heritage is at risk due to disasters, conflict, climate change and a host of other factors.At the same time, cultural heritage is increasingly recognized as a driver of resilience that can support efforts to reduce disaster risks more broadly. Recent years have seen greater emphasis and commitment to protecting heritage and leveraging it for resilience;but initiatives, such as the few examples that are presented here, need to be encouraged and brought more fully into the mainstream of both disaster risk reduction and heritage management. These are issues that can be productively addressed in a post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction and, likewise, in the post-2015 development agenda

Māori provisions in plans: Mana whenua, mauri of water, and wahi tapu

The intention of this document is to allow those using Ngā Mahi: Kaupapa Māori Outcomes an Indicators Kete (Jefferies and Kennedy, 2009, PUCM Māori Report 2) to view a range of examples of Māori provisions within statutory planning documents against plans being evaluated. The extracts in this Report 3 on Māori Provisions in Plans relate to the three tikanga in the Ngā Mahi report: Mana Whenua, Mauri (relating to water), and Wähi Tapu. It is intended that as we develop new kete (containing worksheets and user guides) and thereby expand Ngā Mahi, this current report will be revised to include plan provisions relating to additional tikanga

The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox; Protection and Development of the Dutch Archeological-Historical Landscape and its European Dimension

To what extent can we know past and mainly invisible landscapes, and how we can use this still hidden knowledge for actual sustainable management of landscape’s cultural and historical values. It has also been acknowledged that heritage management is increasingly about ‘the management of future change rather than simply protection’. This presents us with a paradox: to preserve our historic environment, we have to collaborate with those who wish to transform it and, in order to apply our expert knowledge, we have to make it suitable for policy and society. The answer presented by the Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape programme (pdl/bbo) is an integrative landscape approach which applies inter- and transdisciplinarity, establishing links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning, and between research and policy. This is supported by two unifying concepts: ‘biography of landscape’ and ‘action research’. This approach focuses upon the interaction between knowledge, policy and an imagination centered on the public. The European perspective makes us aware of the resourcefulness of the diversity of landscapes, of social and institutional structures, of various sorts of problems, approaches and ways forward. In addition, two related issues stand out: the management of knowledge creation for landscape research and management, and the prospects for the near future. Underlying them is the imperative that we learn from the past ‘through landscape’

Cultural heritage and sustainable development targets : a possible harmonisation? Insights from the European Perspective

The Agenda 2030 includes a set of targets that need to be achieved by 2030. Although none of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focuses exclusively on cultural heritage, the resulting Agenda includes explicit reference to heritage in SDG 11.4 and indirect reference to other Goals. Achievement of international targets shall happen at local and national level, and therefore, it is crucial to understand how interventions on local heritage are monitored nationally, therefore feeding into the sustainable development framework. This paper is focused on gauging the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals with reference to cultural heritage, by interrogating the current way of classifying it (and consequently monitoring). In fact, there is no common dataset associated with monitoring SDGs, and the field of heritage is extremely complex and diversified. The purpose for the paper is to understand if the taxonomy used by different national databases allows consistency in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. The European case study has been chosen as field of investigation, in order to pilot a methodology that can be expanded in further research. A cross‐comparison of a selected sample of publicly accessible national cultural heritage databases has been conducted. As a result, this study confirms the existence of general harmonisation of data towards the achievement of the SDGs with a broad agreement of the conceptualisation of cultural heritage with international frameworks, thus confirming that consistency exists in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. However, diverse challenges of achieving a consistent and coherent approach to integrating culture in sustainability remains problematic. The findings allow concluding that it could be possible to mainstream across different databases those indicators, which could lead to depicting the overall level of attainment of the Agenda 2030 targets on heritage. However, more research is needed in developing a robust correlation between national datasets and international targets

A semantic web approach for built heritage representation

In a built heritage process, meant as a structured system of activities aimed at the investigation, preservation, and management of architectural heritage, any task accomplished by the several actors involved in it is deeply influenced by the way the knowledge is represented and shared. In the current heritage practice, knowledge representation and management have shown several limitations due to the difficulty of dealing with large amount of extremely heterogeneous data. On this basis, this research aims at extending semantic web approaches and technologies to architectural heritage knowledge management in order to provide an integrated and multidisciplinary representation of the artifact and of the knowledge necessary to support any decision or any intervention and management activity. To this purpose, an ontology-based system, representing the knowledge related to the artifact and its contexts, has been developed through the formalization of domain-specific entities and relationships between them