A Conceptual Model for Cultural Heritage Definition and Motivation

Abstract

The appropriate management of archaeological heritage in particular, and cultural heritage in general, requires that we have a deep and shared understanding of what it is and what it is composed of. Without clear answers to these questions, efforts to act on and preserve cultural heritage run the risk to be misguided. This need has been acknowledged by charters and directives; however, there is no clear shared understanding of the underlying concepts and very few analytic efforts have been made to clarify them. Older approaches used to emphasise the intrinsic properties of something to decide whether or not it was part of cultural heritage; nowadays, the trend is to look at how communities of people assign value to things. This paper presents a conceptual model of cultural, including archaeological, heritage that addresses two major concerns: what cultural heritage is (its definition) and why something becomes cultural heritage (its motivation).