The Future of the Past

Abstract

Those who want to develop sustainable strategies for the future of our landscapes cannot be without a thorough knowledge of the heritage that the past has bequeathed to us. Countless generations before us have developed, step by step and layer by layer, the landscape of today and have left their mark on it. Sometimes this happened very gradually and in a totally organic way, sometimes through an abrupt break with everything that had been before and with the transformation towards a completely new landscape. Each generation has made its own choices as to which traces of the past were to be cherished, which were to be implicitly included in the present landscape and which ones were to be destroyed. Cultural heritage can be defined as contemporary use of the past in order to create imagined features (Ashworth and Larkham 1994). Cultural heritage is therefore not just about the physical traces of the past but also about the world of ideas that lies behind the interactions with the past by both past and present generations (Lowenthal 1993, Jones 2003, Vecco 2010). Few fields in the worlds of research, policy and management are as diverse as that of cultural heritage. It includes tangible culture (such as artefacts, buildings, monuments and landscapes), intangible culture (such as folklore, traditions, language and historical knowledge) and natural heritage (including culturally significant landscapes and ecosystems). Cultural heritage concerns heritage located both aboveground as well as underground, both in urban areas as well as rural ones and both in the sea and on land. The number of scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines that is involved with this richly varied cultural heritage is equally large and includes, amongst others, geoscientists, archaeologists, paleoecologists, architectural historians, urban planning historians, landscape historians, chemical and physical material experts, art historians, maritime historians, toponymists and cultural anthropologists. Many of these heritage categories, levels of scale and specialisations come together in the historically evolved landscape. For this reason, an integrated approach to the cultural heritage on the level of the landscape is of great importance.