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Contemporary Heritage and the Future

Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg

We need to define in advance a response to the great issues of the

next two decades, to define a future just as we have always presumed
to create the past. Archaeology is about change and time; future time
differs only from past time in its pace, and as a profession we should
be able to adjust to the future, and direct it, more than most.

Graham Fairclough, abstract written for the session ‘Archaeology

Tomorrow’, which he organized at the 1992 Institute of Field Archae-
ology’s Archaeology in Britain conference

Studies of the future are pertinent in order to make the best decisions in present
society. They are, however, full of difficulties, as the future is an empirical field
which does not exist (Slaughter, 1996; Bell, 1997; Mogensen, 2006). Both per-
tinence and difficulties apply also to studying the future in relation to human
culture. The main challenge lies in the circumstance that cultural heritage of
the future cannot in itself be empirically investigated and described, since it is
in part dependent on decisions that have not yet been made. Studying heritage
futures is thus about considering what we know about cultural heritage in the
context of prognoses and visions of what will come. Yet how do we do that?
The American anthropologist Samuel Gerald Collins contributed to an inter-
esting discussion on how anthropology and anthropologists have previously
embraced the future and how they might now be embracing it. He empha-
sized that an important approach is to vouchsafe the possibility that future
ways in which people will think and act may be very different from today, and,
in doing so, to open up a space (or a spacetime) for critical reflection on the
present (Collins, 2008, p. 8). This approach is a useful programmatic declaration
for engaging with the future in disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology,
history and heritage studies.
Studying the future of cultural heritage and the cultural heritage of the future
is, accordingly, very much about acknowledging different ways of thinking and

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E. Waterton et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015
510 Conclusions

acting regarding cultural heritage in the future and, in doing so, opening up
for critical reflection on cultural heritage in our own present. In line with this,
our interest lies in questions on how cultural heritage and the future are inter-
connected and what this tells us about the present. Although our perspective
is largely archaeological, we will discuss some forms of non-archaeological cul-
tural heritage that in all likelihood will be of the distant future. We will also
review how the heritage sector has failed to give sufficient attention to future
issues and argue that this shortcoming should be remedied as soon as possi-
ble. Finally, we will introduce the theoretical concept of future consciousness
and emphasize it as a vital concept to establish future studies within heritage
studies.
Throughout this chapter, we will be critical of the prevailing conservation
ethos within the heritage sector. But it is important to emphasize that the
discussion we want to raise here is not about whether or not heritage sites
categorically ought to be protected and preserved. Instead, we wish to draw
attention to and discuss the fact that the heritage sector lacks a thorough
engagement with questions concerning the future benefits of cultural heritage
and thus concerning the appropriateness of present-day practices and policies
in heritage management.

Cultural heritage, the future and thought styles

There are some very profound and deep-reaching links between past, present
and future. The archaeologist Patrick V. Kirch, for example, states that an
archaeology of prehistoric global change investigating the effects of uncon-
trolled human population growth on environmental degradation ultimately
leading to sociopolitical crises can make a contribution ‘to the future of this
planet’ (Kirch, 2004, p. 23). In environmental studies, models of prehistoric
climate change and long-term human impact on the environment have been
used to discuss past climate variation and possible future trends (Rockström
et al., 2009). The historian Daniel Lord Smail uses the long-term perspective of
prehistoric human evolution to discuss the deep history of the human brain
and its past, present and future to delineate an understanding of what is fun-
damentally human today and how this understanding might be constituted in
the future (Smail, 2008). There is also interesting research concerning cultural
heritage and the implications of known future trends, such as demographic
changes. For example, museums have been developing strategies in order to
improve the quality of life of the increasing number of senior citizens with
Alzheimer’s disease or dementia and their caregivers (Rhoads, 2009). Our focus
here is, however, somewhat different.
Heritage management is a futuristic activity because to a large extent it is
motivated by the present-day desire to preserve the remains of the past for the