Conflict and Heritage

Summary

During recent years cultural heritage has moved into public awareness as part of contemporary conflicts. Destructions of sites and monuments in The Middle East and North Africa, and in the former Yugoslavia have given us blatant examples also of targeted destruction. However this is nothing new. Throughout history monuments and heritage have played their part in conflict between people. A recent conflict in the United States over monuments relating to the Civil War and its aftermath has further highlighted the importance of heritage as an active factor in how we understand ourselves and others in the stream of history.

But in order to fully appreciate what we are dealing with in the interplay of heritage and conflict, we need to understand that conflicts themselves are part of our cultural heritage. Conflicts that sometimes reach even far back into history is a living heritage with both tangible and intangible properties. They condition our contemporary interactions with "the other" and contemporary politics. The paper proposes approaches to understanding and dealing with the complex connections between heritage and conflict.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22757