Heritage Futures

Heritage Futures is a four-year collaborative international research programme (2015–2019) funded by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ‘Care for the Future’ Theme Large Grant, and supported additionally by its host universities and partner organisations. The research programme involves ambitious interdisciplinary research to explore the potential for innovation and creative exchange across a broad range of heritage and related fields, in partnership with a number of academic and non-academic institutions and interest groups. It is distinctive in its comparative approach which aims to bring heritage conservation practices of various forms into closer dialogue with the management of other material and virtual legacies such as nuclear waste management. It is also distinctive in its exploration of different forms of heritage as future-making practices. This brief paper provides an introduction to the research programme and its aims and methods

Heritage Futures

Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management. 'I suspect this book will prove to be a revolutionary addition to the field of heritage studies, flipping the gaze from the past to the future. Heritage Futures reveals the deep uncertainties and precarities that shape both everyday and political life today: accumulation and waste, care and hope, the natural and the toxic. It represents a uniquely impressive intellectual and empirical roadmap for both anticipating and questioning future trajectories, and the strange, unfamiliar places heritage will take us.’ - Tim Winter, University of Western Australi

Heritage Futures

Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management. 'I suspect this book will prove to be a revolutionary addition to the field of heritage studies, flipping the gaze from the past to the future. Heritage Futures reveals the deep uncertainties and precarities that shape both everyday and political life today: accumulation and waste, care and hope, the natural and the toxic. It represents a uniquely impressive intellectual and empirical roadmap for both anticipating and questioning future trajectories, and the strange, unfamiliar places heritage will take us.’ - Tim Winter, University of Western Australi

Broad Down, Devon: archaeological and other stories

publication-status: PublishedThis is a post-print, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication Journal of Material Culture, 2010, Vol. 15, Issue 3, pp. 345 - 367. Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/15/3/345.shortThis article explores the knowledge construction process of an archaeological site in East Devon, UK. Bouncing off an oral historical account of the site that seems to run against scientific truth claims, the author investigates the story of how knowledge of the site has developed over the last two centuries. Building on previous work that explores the history and practice of archaeology, the article opens up questions of what counts as evidence. Then, taking a cue from more recent work that suggests a more dynamic and open-ended engagement with the landscape, the article turns to examine how the meaning of a site can be made and remade. As part of this endeavour, questions of what as well as who can ‘speak’ are examined and some space is opened up for the agency of ‘minor figures’, both human and non-human

Creative Destruction and Neoliberal Landscapes: Post-industrial Archaeologies Beyond Ruins

This volume aims to position the city as one of the most important and dynamic arenas for archaeological studies of the contemporary by presenting a range of theoretically-engaged case studies that highlight some of the major issues that ..

Heritage and Data: Challenges and Opportunities for the Heritage Sector. Report of the Heritage Data Research Workshop held Friday 23 June 2017 at the British Library, London

The event held at the British Library on the 23rd June 2017 was envisaged as an initial scoping and investigative research workshop, bringing together key representatives from the UK heritage industry and academic community from humanities and social and computing science to discuss challenges and opportunities that data presents to the Heritage Sector. The workshop was organised as a collaborative event between the AHRC Heritage Priority Area, the AHRC-funded Heritage Futures research programme, the Alan Turing Institute and the British Library with an intention to create an interdisciplinary space for discussion of the role of data in heritage research, bringing together practitioners with members of the academic community to discuss these issues

Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage

First paragraph: What do museums and archives, historic buildings preservation, rewilding initiatives, botanic gardens, and space messaging have in common? These fields share a desire to preserve 'things' (buildings, objects, places, monuments, species, knowledge) that are valued, yet are considered at risk of endangerment from loss, destruction, or decay. Practices of listing on heritage registers, or designation to protected status, articulate the view that potential or real threats must be mitigated, usually through some form of active intervention to protect. While taken-for-granted, this endangerment approach is increasingly being questioned by academic researchers (e.g., Harrison 2013, Rico 2015, Vidal and Dias 2016; DeSilvey 2017). Could heritage management and conservation be practiced differently if uncoupled from the ideas of risk and endangerment? If heritage preservation is future-oriented - in that heritage practitioners work to protect the past for the future - then what future, or futures, is it working towards, and is each the same across different kinds of preservation practices? How do we choose what to save for posterity? Questions such as these deserve far greater attention than is ordinarily given in scholarship or practice.The articles from Context are published on a searchable on-line archive six months after publication: http://ihbc.org.uk/page55/context_archive/index.htm