Digital Approaches for Dissonant Heritage, Examples from Alberta

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The term dissonant heritage addresses the conflicting nature of heritage when different groups or individuals attribute contested meanings to the past. Often these sites have dark histories and are associated with death, trauma, or suffering and conflict arises from a contestation over whose perspectives and experiences surrounding a heritage are most valid. Cultural heritage is often seen as a world resource, but in giving a specific meaning to the past and what aspects are valued or not this inherently legitimizes at least one perspective over others and through the legitimization of one past over the other, heritage becomes a tool for maintaining, creating, or establishing specific social orders. Using examples of heritages sites from Alberta, Canada that have been digitally documented using reality capture technologies, this paper discusses benefits of digital approaches for the preservation, management, and interpretation of dissonant heritage sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36564.0