UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Gamma Fields: The Industrial Legacy We Cannot Afford to Forget

2025-04-28

By Claudio Pescatore

What if the true monuments of the nuclear age are not vaults, vitrified blocks, or warning markers—but fields of invisible light?

  • Gamma radiation is insidious. It leaves no ruin, no ash, no wound you can see. You don’t need to touch it. You don’t need to breathe it in. You simply pass by—and it passes into you. No trace is left on the soil. But a trace is left in you. And when the next person passes, they too receive the signal. Yet the source remains—unchanged, unweakened.
  • Most poisons are spent as they harm. Gamma radiation is not. It accumulates elsewhere, silently, without diminishing its source. A kind of ambient inheritance.

In a recent study, I calculated the gamma radiation field unleashed by humanity’s Uranium-238 (U-238) legacy. The results show that this field is not temporary. It is already present, slow to mature, but geologically assured and radiologically significant, beyond safety thresholds.

  • Mill tailings scattered across continents emit gamma radiation through uranium’s progeny. This signal will slowly fade over the next half a million years—but it will reach a baseline, unsafe value and will continue indefinitely.
  • Meanwhile, depleted uranium stockpiles—which emit almost no gamma today—are quietly maturing. From a few thousand years onward, their gamma output will rise steadily, eventually overtaking significantly that of tailings, peaking in two million years, and continuing unabated into geological time.
  • Most U-238 residues lie close to the surface—mill tailings, depleted uranium (DU) stockpiles, weapons testing sites, contaminated soils from mining and from exploded DU munitions. Even when their radiation does not cause immediate harm, it defines a long-term environmental signal whose meaning we have barely begun to grasp.

This raises questions not only of science, but of ethics, inheritance, and imagination:

  • What does it mean to leave behind a hazard that grows in potency over time?
  • How do we warn future beings of a danger concealed in ordinary soil or dust?
  • Should gamma radiation be seen not only as threat, but also as a marker of human agency?

Nuclear waste lasts a long time. But U-238 isn’t just persistent—it performs. It changes. It regenerates. It returns. And surprisingly, we don’t call it waste. We call it an industrial by-product.

And now we are not just leaving behind a signal—we are leaving a body.

  • About 4.5 million tonnes of U-238, mostly in oxide form, now reside in uranium tailings, DU, and spent fuel. It is a real, physical legacy—not symbolic, not speculative. This body must be put away—not forgotten, but deliberately placed and traced. Shielded, marked, and remembered.
  • We can still act. We can treat uranium’s gamma legacy not as an afterthought, but as a defining part of our industrial inheritance. This won’t undo the past—but it may shape how future generations understand what we’ve left them.

We often speak of the nuclear age as bracketed—confined by Cold War dates or the operational lifespan of reactors. But its material consequences are just beginning. Care begins by acknowledging and tending to what endures.

Claudio Pescatore
Claudio Pescatore is a member of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University

Read more: http://www.nukleonika.pl/www/back/full/vol70_2025/v70n2p031f.pdf 

Miras Gelecekleri

2025-04-14

Miras Gelecekleri is “Heritage Futures” in Turkish!

I was interviewed by Erman Ertuğrul for the popular Turkish website arkeofili.

In the interview I am talking, among others, on how I got into archaeology at age 10 and then, much later, into future archaeology.

See for the English version: https://arkeofili.com/on-future-archaeology-an-interview-with-cornelius-holtorf/ and for the Turkish version: https://arkeofili.com/gelecek-arkeolojisi-uzerine-cornelius-holtorf-roportaji/

Thank you, Erman!

New article on urban transformation, heritage and social sustainability

2025-04-03

Bebyggelsehistorisk Tidskrift (Nordic Journal of Settlement History and Built Heritage): Urban transformation, heritage processes and social sustainable futures by Ulrika Söderström & Anders Högberg.

Short summary:

In this study, we use three case studies to discuss heritage processes as future-building practices. Through examples from urban regeneration processes in three Swedish cities, we discuss how these processes have contributed to social sustainability. The case studies are the Caroli neighbourhood in Malmö (transformed 1967-1973), the Valnötsträdet neighbourhood in Kalmar (transformed 2008-2018) and the ongoing transformation of Kiruna city. Our findings show that the cultural heritage processes activated in urban regeneration processes do not always promote socially sustainable future-making practices. We conclude that an engagement in different forms of future-making is crucial for heritage processes to contribute to long-term sustainable urban development. We suggest that this requires a way of thinking and acting that includes change and transformation. Our findings are conceptualised in a model that we hope can be used to understand heritage processes as future-making practices in urban transformation projects.

Bebyggelsehistorisk Tidskrift is a Nordic forum for research and debate on the history of the built environment. It is the Nordic region’s leading academic journal on the history of the built environment. The periodical presents the latest research on the history of the built environment, and also provides a forum for discussing the discipline in practice when buildings and heritage environments are being conserved.

https://bebyggelsehistoria.org/en/bebyggelsehistorisk-tidskrift-english/

Open access (Doctoral Thesis by Ulrika Söderström) https://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1901953

————————

POSTSCRIPT 13 April 2025. Here is a graphical summary of the paper prepared by ChatGPT:

Various activities January – March 2025

2025-04-02

Cornelius Holtorf took part in the first meeting of the Heritage and Climate Change Working Group of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Interpretation and Presentation (ICIP) (14 January 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf lectured on “Communicating Cultural Heritage with the Future” for 15 students reading the course “Cultural Heritage and Communication” as part of the Undergraduate Programme in Cultural Heritage in Present and Future Socities at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden (5 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf lectured on “Unesco världsarv: vad kommuniceras för framtida generationers skull?” for 15 students reading the course “Cultural Heritage and Communication” as part of the Undergraduate Programme in Cultural Heritage in Present and Future Socities at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden (10 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf participated in a short survey on the illicit trafficking of cultural property, with a particular focus on its online dimension, shaping discussions at the upcoming UNESCO Conference “Addressing Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property in the Digital Era” to be held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 26 June 2025 (15 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf had an informal meeting with Ulrik Brandén, Deputy Mayor of Mörbylånga, Emma Rydnér, World Heritage Coordinator at Mörbylånga Municipality, and Örjan Molander, Director at Kalmar County Museum, on various ideas for collaboration regarding development of the UNESCO World Heritage property Agricultural Landscape of Southern Öland (20 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf took place in the regular meeting of the International Scientific Committee on AeroSpace Heritage of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) which discussed, among others, the recent listing of the sites on the Moon on the World Monuments Watch List 2025 by the World Monuments Fund (21 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf attended the 8th Annual Heritage Lecture of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre on ”Changing concepts Future of the and the ’Ethics of Repair’”, given by Aleida Assmann, Professor of English Literature and General Literary Studies, Universität Konstanz (28 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf presented a keynote lecture on “Time Travel – More than Learning About the Past” for ca 50 listeners in the room and another 20 online, coming together for the conference Re-Action: Time Travels in a Changing Worl – Bridging Ages 20 Years in Kalmar, Sweden (4 March 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf had an informal meeting with Steven Hartman, Executive Director of the BRIDGES Sustainability Science Coalition in UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST), on ways of future collaboration (7 March 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf met with Shanti Morell-Hart of the Dept of Anthropology at Brown University in Providence, USA, for an informal conversation about seeds and heritage futures (14 March 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf met in Providence, USA, with Philip Segadika of the National Museum of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana, for an informal conversation about collabloration on heritage futures (16 March 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf participated actively discussing heritage processes and futures literacy in the first Plenary Meeting of the Expert Group on Archiving and Awareness Preservation (EGAAP-1) of the Nuclear Energy Agency held online and at the OECD in Paris (19-20 March 2025).

Conference by the Swedish National Heritage Board

2025-03-24

Anders Högberg held a keynote lecture at the conference “Kulturarvsforskning i Sverige 2025” – Cultural Heritage Research in Sweden 2025, organised by the Swedish National Heritage Board 20-21 March 2025 in Stockholm. Keynote paper: ‘Cultural heritage research 2025 – some thoughts on where we stand and questions for the future’.

Ulrika Söderström also presented her dissertation at the conference: “Cultural heritage as a resource in socially sustainable urban development: A designed living environment for the future”.

More about the dissertation here

Kulturarvsforskning i Sverige 2025 -Riksantikvarieämbetet (The Conference Programme in Swedish)

Anders Högberg
Anders Högberg, Professor of Archaeology UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures
Ulrika Söderström
Ulrika Söderström, Doctor of Archaeology UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures

Natural Heritage Futures

2025-03-17

I was able to develop some thoughts on natural heritage futures as an invited speaker at the conference From Menageries, to Zoos, to Everything in Between: Can we Envision a New Breed of Zoos? held at Brown University in Providence, USA (15 March 2025) for ca 50 attending participants.


My contribution was as follows:

Zoos and natural heritage futures
This talk is about zoos and the roles of natural heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies. I will present several ways in which zoos can contribute to raising significant issues that directly address anticipated needs of future societies. This includes questions on what it means to be human, the relations between human and non-human lifeforms, and how to make sense of a changing world through animals. That world will face the following challenges, among others:

  • AI/machine learning: challenging the distinction between things and people
  • Space exploration (Mars): raising questions about belonging and responsibilities in the Universe
  • Climate change and environmental destruction: blurring the boundary between nature and culture

Zoos remain significant in the future because they can be creating opportunities for engaging people in stories about what it means to be human and about a variety of ways for human societies of relating to the natural world.

Conference on restoration and conservation in Gothenburg

2025-03-03

On the 25th of February 2025 Gustav Wollentz presented and participated in a panel discussion at the conference “The Houses, the History, and the Future” (Husen, historien och framtiden) that was organized in Gothenburg by Gothenburg University and multiple other partners in the region. There were around 140 heritage professionals attending the conference, mostly working with, and researching on, the conservation and restoration of  buildings.

Gustav contributed to the final part of the conference, where future challenges and opportunities were in focus. Gustav presented the work on Strategic Foresight he has been carrying out together with ICCROM, including the Horizon Scanning looking 15 years ahead,  and the work for the pan-European ARCHE project, with the goal to produce a new Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for Heritage in Europe.

In the presentation, Gustav focused on four specific opportunities for action related to future change:

  1. Heritage to shape more desirable, sustainable and just futures,
  2. Heritage to increase wellbeing,
  3. Heritage to understand and reveal the humanity in individuals,
  4. Heritage to cope with loss and change.

The presentation and panel discussion were very well received and there was a large interest to further explore Strategic Foresight.

For those interested in the ICCROM Horizon Scanning, it is available here: https://www.iccrom.org/publication/anticipating-futures-heritage

For those interested in the Foresight-work within the ARCHE project, the report is available here: https://www.heritageresearch-hub.eu/app/uploads/2024/04/ARCHE_D2.1_Report-on-Future-Trends-on-Cultural-Heritage-RI-3.pdf

Gustav Wollentz
Gustav Wollentz, UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures

UNESCO MOST Winter School

2025-02-27

I was lecturing this week on ”The Climate Heritage Paradox – towards a paradigm shift in cultural heritage” for an audience of 70+ physical and online participants coming together for the 7th UNESCO MOST Winter School held at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Köszeg (iASK), Hungary.

On the same panel were also also Gábor Soós, Secretary-General of UNESCO Hungary, Klaus Wölfer, former Ambassador of Austria, Anna Zeichner of ICCROM, and Tamás Fejérdy of ICOMOS and iASK, among others

The meeting was organised in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair for Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainability held by Professor Ferenc Miszlivetz at the University of Pannonia, Hungary.

The Climate Heritage Paradox – towards a paradigm shift in cultural heritage

For the cultural heritage sector to address adequately the global challenges of climate change, it needs to resolve the Climate Heritage Paradox which consists of two conundrums. Firstly, in contemporary society, when humanity anticipates and prepares for climate change and associated transformations, cultural heritage predominantly looks backward and emphasizes identities and continuities over time. Secondly, when humanity on Earth needs panhuman solidarity, trust, and collaboration to be able to face enormous global challenges together, cultural heritage is still managed and interpreted within frameworks of regional/national governance. There is, therefore, a need for developing new understandings of cultural heritage that (a) are predominantly about stories of change and transformation rather than continuity and spatial belonging, and (b) express a need for humanity to collaborate globally and overcome national boundaries. Such a paradigm change in cultural heritage will protect and enhance the benefits of cultural heritage for the future in the age of climate change.

Heritage Futures – origins and significance

2025-01-30

In an interview published by the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, I am talking about origins and significance of ‘heritage futures’, both for me and my work and academically in a more general sense.

Specifically, I am answering the following questions:

  1. What inspired your interest in the concept of “heritage futures,” and how do you see this concept reshaping the field of heritage studies and archaeology?
  2. Your work challenges traditional approaches to heritage by emphasizing its dynamic nature in contemporary society. Could you provide some examples of how this approach has influenced your own research or projects?
  3. In your view, what is the role of archaeology and heritage studies in addressing global issues such as climate change, sustainability, and cultural identity?