Cultural significance for heritage source

Now continue with this conceptual framework. I now want to look at values. I keep talking about values. Now let’s have a look at what I mean by values. And here I want to quote from a commerce document, the Nara document on authenticity from 1994. This is when things started to change in how we saw heritage places is not being monuments and sites, but having intangible aspects. Conservation of cultural heritage in all its forms and historical period is rooted in the values attributed to the heritage. Related to the concept of values is that of meaning of heritage places, including landscapes. It’s important to note in relation to meaning that it will change over time, as cultural traditions and values change.

And understanding meanings and values is therefore fundamental to the cultural heritage process, and of course a value based approach to research and practice internationally.

There are internationally available typologies of heritage values. Here. I show them.

So these typologies they break down what we call significance into constituent kinds of heritage value. I’ll come back to the word significance in a moment.

They combine the views of experts, citizens, communities, governments, and other stakeholders or they should do. And all these can be voiced and compared effectively. What is critical to the process is the respect due to all cultures requires that heritage properties must be considered and judged within the cultural context to which they belong. In other words, we should be judging landscapes here in Asia, China in particular, by the cultural context in which this situated and which form them. Here is a sample of values, the values-based approach to heritage conservation. Addressing intangible heritage is, for example, central to the Australia ICOMOS Burra Charter. The first edition was 1977, it’s gone through various iterations, the latest is 2019.

And we used aesthetic value, historic value, scientific value, social value, and spiritual value. Until 2013, spiritual value is not in, strangely enough. And then it was added quite rightly too. There is a document in China, that China ICOMOS Principles of determining cultural significance. And this has artistic, historical, scientific. I happen to think that artistic is actually better than aesthetic. Aesthetic is a very Western word and often difficult. A lot of people think aesthetic means beautiful, it’s the best. It doesn’t actually mean that. And the China ICOMOS Principles were actually based on the Burra Charter. We have the values from English heritage. And you’ll see there it’s interesting, they add economic, recreational, educational, and academic.

And then I put at the bottom the World Heritage Convention and its Operational Guidelines. And it has what are called criteria for determining outstanding universal value, significance, OUV as we call it, for cultural properties. And here, cultural significance is the sum of the qualities of values that the place has, including the five values. This is someone talking about the Burra Charter, comes from the five values, you could equally apply to the others, the aesthetic, historic, scientific, social, and spiritual, because that are listed in Article 1.2 of the Burra Charter. Through the processes of investigating the place and assessing each of these values, which we’re going to go into in a moment, we can clearly describe why a place is important.

And this is the first step towards ensuring that our decisions and actions don’t diminish its significance.

In practice values are normally assessed and analyzed, so the statement of significance can be prepared for the heritage resource under study and its management. Think of the music in simply is important, its meaning and importance to people. For World Heritage properties, significance is set out in the statement of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). It’s therefore critical that the process of research, and also that of documentation used in practice, to unravel values and significance of landscapes

or any property follows this framework: That it’s apparent and understandable by other researchers, by clients, community and other stakeholders. It includes methods that are replicable, they can be repeated. You can apply it somewhere else, so that their application can be tested elsewhere and modified where appropriate.

And here archival and on-site research will be vital components. And I’ll come to this. When we look at the landscape in the context of informing rigorous practice, so it’s important to look at the archives, but it’s important to get into feel and look. You read up about the landscape or whatever you’re dealing with, and then go out and try to apply what you’ve read in the archives, records what you see. Many start a piece together, a picture, of how this landscape has in fact, come together. The 3rd part is that an approach to study that’s replicable. It also allows evaluation of proposed decisions or recommendations.

You do the study, somebody has to evaluate it, and they need clear guidelines (on what the evaluate) on what they are evaluating. Because if you don’t do that, you do a study and you come up with

recommendations that are not clear. Somebody might say, Oh, that’s not what we want you to do. you followed this process. You can say, Ah, you know, I have followed process.

Let’s see how the hand, this sort of thing is applied. And the next section, for reading the landscape, identification, documentation, assessment, analysis and evaluation.