UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Beyond fear of the future concerning heritage

2025-09-02

I listened today to the keynote lecture by Tatjana Cvjetićanin during the Opening session of the Annual Conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in 2025. She has been the Director of the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade (2003-2012).

In her lecture, Cvjetićanin asked whether archaeological heritage really always provides benefits for the future, whether it is sensible to do archaeological “hoarding” of finds in collections, and why we always have to fear the future for perpetual crises of endangerment of archaeological heritage.

Instead, she referred to the Heritage Futures project (Harrison et al 2020) and emphasized archaeologists’ responsibility to work with the public for the public, described the nature of their work as ‘heritage-making’, and insisted on the temporally and spatially variable value of archaeological heritage.

Very interesting to follow in lectures like this one how heritage futures are gradually becoming mainstream in Archaeology… 🙂

An Archaeology for the Future

2020-05-31

Archaeology is the study of the past in the present. But can it deal with the future too?

  • Which future(s) are archaeologists working for?
  • Which archaeological heritage will benefit future generations most?
  • How can archaeologists build capacity in futures thinking? 

Some thoughts on these issues have now been published by Cornelius Holtorf in Post-Classical Archaeologies vol 10. By reviewing some recent and current projects conducted at Linnaeus University in Sweden he shows that it is possible to engage actively and constructively with the future and consider benefits of archaeology for future societies.