Symmetry in heritage management practice

-John Schofield

This contribution concerns heritage management practices as they exist today, and the profound changes in social and political context that are causing us to rethink and reassess these practices; to question their currency, suitability and relevance. The law relating to archaeological sites in the UK for example is grounded in late nineteenth century legislation. Is it still fit-for purpose? Can this and other aspects of heritage management practice be modernised in a way that reflects changes in society and governance? My contention here is that it can, and that a symmetrical approach provides the framework for doing so.

I am going to begin by contextualising the practices that exist today, and briefly consider how the heritage is becoming increasingly multi-vocal, continuous, holistic and relevant. I’ll then consider how these principles can influence heritage management practices specifically in terms of RESEARCH, IDENTIFICATION, EVALUATION, PROTECTION and PRESENTATION.

Since heritage legislation was introduced to the UK in 1882, and even to some extent since the first buildings’ protection in 1932, society has changed irrevocably. Within communities we have become increasingly diverse, with politics and politicians gradually tuning-in to that diversity, in education and social policy for example. Further, people are increasingly aware (and made-aware) of their heritage, and encouraged to participate in it; to research it, understand it, and be supportive of a desire to preserve it. Increasingly people do support the heritage, as English Heritage’s Power of Place document revealed. Yet still archaeological sites are protected according to many of the same criteria as they were over a century ago, and buildings by the same measure as in the 1930s, criteria that reflect a particular view and very specific perceptions of what constitutes value. Broadly speaking these criteria are universal as are their shortcomings.

In another Power of Place (1995), Dolores Hayden noted that of Los Angeles’ 3.5 million people in 1990, just under 40% were Hispanic, 37% white, 13% black, just under 10% Asian American or Pacific Islander and 0.5% Native American. Further, she noted how Los Angeles was the largest Mexican, Armenian, Filipino, Salvadoran and Guatamalan city in the world, the third largest Canadian city, and had the largest Japanese, Iranian, Cambodian and Gypsy communities in the United States. Hollywood High School housed students who spoke 35 native languages. Los Angeles’s population has always been diverse. However city biographies and landmarks fail to reflect that diversity. They each favour a small minority of white, male landowners, bankers, business and political leaders. In fact 98% of Los Angeles’s designated cultural-historic landmarks are Anglo-American, and only 4% were associated with any aspect of women’s history. So, as Dolores Hayden says, three-quarters of the current population must find its public, collective past in a small fraction of the city’s monuments, or live with someone else’s choices about the city’s history. The major ethnic groups that have always been part of the city have been dispossessed. And the new immigrants have every reason to be confused, she said.

We can see the same in London. In the area of Tower Hamlets over 90% of the resident population is Bengalee. There are many listed buildings in this area – buildings that are protected by law, and the Bengalee residents have clear and strongly-held views on the built environment and what they value about it. Yet the official ‘expert’ view of what matters bears no relation at all to the locally-held opinions of residents. They value their religious houses, community centres, markets and meeting areas; yet officially it’s the historic churches and works by renowned architects that matter more.

A symmetrical approach would attempt to involve the dispossessed and the confused in deciding what matters most, and what to do with it. And this can work – as has been demonstrated in Australia where migrant communities are being encouraged to understand and give value to ‘their’ heritage places. I’ll return to this example later.

Traditionally there has been a chronological separation between past and present, with heritage experts only taking a view on the significance of those artefacts, ancient monuments and historic buildings ‘from antiquity’. When the first schedule of ancient monuments was drawn up in 1882, all twenty-four sites were prehistoric and monumental. With time the Schedule expanded to include Roman sites, then medieval, post-medieval and more recently industrial and modern military archaeology. Gradually, the separation between past and present has been eroded therefore, and the present has become past. As archaeology has become more concerned with recent material culture, so the heritage sector has responded by commissioning research that can inform conservation decisions about it. Which monuments of the Cold War era do we most wish to keep for example? How should we balance protecting historic landscape character with the inevitable processes of change and creation that form part of the character? Here specifically significant progress has been made in recent years and symmetry is clearly in evidence. Yet still there is some bias towards earlier remains. Still the older things are, the more valuable they appear to be. Still change is viewed with suspicion. Yet as archaeologists change is the thing we understand best of all. Things change. We can’t prevent that. What we can do as archaeologists, and heritage officials, is to recognise the process and the impacts of change, and manage the process accordingly, working with it rather than against it. The past in the present in other words, and recognising that how we manage it now affects the past that communities will encounter in the future.

Once, planners would consider the impact of major developments on the historic environment by viewing options – for a road scheme, a major housing development – in relation to a map of recorded archaeological sites and historic buildings – the archaeological constraints in other words. Put simply, planners and developers would take the view that if they simply avoided the mapped constraints, all would be well. But as we all know those dots are fairly meaningless: they record interventions and events, and thus bear only the vaguest of relations to past activity and thus to measuring environmental impact. The technology now exists to take a more holistic view. In the UK and Europe, historic landscape characterisation offers a broader view of landscape character, being the historic processes that have given particular areas of landscape their distinctive characteristics. These can be large upland areas, fields with their associated settlement, or they can be areas of market towns for example, or an area of terraced housing in a former industrial centre that’s fallen on hard times. Current proposals exist in England to build thousands of new homes in the south-east of the country in the next two to three decades. Where should these houses go? By simply plotting out all records of archaeological sites (notably scheduled monuments), listed buildings and other constraints, developers and planners could simply produce a scheme that avoids them so far as possible, and taking other factors such as access, waste management etc into account. But characterisation can enable a much more sophisticated and helpful dialogue between the developers, planners, local communities and the heritage sector. Based on a GIS, characterisation documents the historic fabric of the countryside, how well preserved medieval field patterns are for example, how much boundary loss has occurred already, how sensitive to change the various character areas are, and what form and density of settlement is characteristic in the areas concerned. Some areas may be characterised by small dispersed hamlets and farmsteads, with little change over the past 300 years. Other areas may have nucleated settlement that have seen much more expansion and change. These latter areas may be better able to accommodate further changes than the areas of dispersed settlement.

This approach has an obvious application, and provides the basis for dialogue, not just involving planners, developers and heritage officials, but politicians and local communities as well. And it promotes a very clear and important message: that the historic environment is not just about dots-on-maps. It exists everywhere, all around us.

And it matters. People value their historic environment, especially when their special places, their landscapes, are given recognition, even if only by being on a map. There is a danger that heritage – as officially sanctioned and undertaken - will commodify and package things – places, objects, reports on interventions – in a way that separates them off from society. Material things in other words become reports, photographs, management plans. We need to ensure that these things are relevant to people in the form of places that remain or become accessible, for example through GIS, the internet etc.

Characterisation maps exist now covering almost the whole of England (www.english-heritage.org.uk/characterisation), and the technology exists to take the GIS products around local communities, and engage people in discussion about the maps. We can encourage local communities to generate their own layers on the GIS, cognitive maps of their values, perceptions and personal experiences, even (perhaps especially) where those experiences are traumatic ones. Similar in fact to work in Australia where Aboriginal Women’s heritage has been recorded in New South Wales. Women tell their stories based on the places they have experienced, and events that happened there. As one woman said, ‘everywhere I look here holds a memory. Even out at the Headlands and Swimming Creek. It doesn’t matter where you go, there are memories.’

It is perhaps no coincidence that people have become more interested in the heritage, and better able to appreciate its value and meaning, commensurate with a growing recognition of local values, and a willingness amongst heritage bodies to understand and document those values. In a recent survey of public opinion, 96% of people in England felt the historic environment was important to teach them about the past. A symmetrical approach recognises the importance of these public values and perceptions, alongside (and perhaps even in preference to) official or expert views of the past, and the fact that we experience and engage with these places in a number of ways, not just visually but through other sensations, as well as thought, feeling and intuition. ICOMOS recently recognised this fact, by taking more of an interest in intangible heritage – cuisine, music, traditions, folklore etc.

In England the regulatory and administrative systems by which heritage is managed are currently under review. Heritage protection is being reviewed by the Government department responsible, taking advice from its statutory advisors at English Heritage and the wider heritage community, and planning too is being reformed, with that process becoming more participatory in nature. But how can the move towards a symmetrical approach to heritage management be promulgated even more effectively? What has worked so far, and what could still be improved?

Research agenda determine and document research priorities for particular geographical areas or subjects. These are often written by experts and serve as a basis for decision making – what are the research priorities, where are competing resources best directed? A symmetrical approach would ensure these agenda take account of multiple views, and promote diverse and multidisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies. The process of producing agenda would be inclusive and bottom-up, hearing all views and reaching a consensus on priorities. Currently a partnership involving English Heritage, the universities of Bristol and University College London, and Atkins Heritage are co-ordinating an agenda for the later twentieth-century. A website exists (www.changeandcreation.org), and a document was produced which asks:

What do you remember most clearly about the 20th century? How are those events or activities still represented in the landscape?

What do you appreciate, dislike or miss about the later 20th century landscape?

What do you think about change and creation? Would you prefer our landscape to be more like it was in the early 20th century?

What can and what should we do with modern landscape character? What should we be recording now for the future?

Do you have ideas for engaging your community, school or local society with aspects of the 20th century landscape?

This consultation is the first stage in a process leading towards a research agenda for the contemporary past. It’s comprehensive, democratic and participatory.

Identification of heritage resources has moved beyond the historic, and beyond the recognition only of specific heritage ‘assets’. We recognise the conventional historic resources – buildings, monuments – but we also now recognise the full range of components that make up the historic environment. Landscape character for example, intangible heritage (musical traditions, cuisine, dress and fashion, dialect) and modern heritage. A current project at Greenham Common for example (www.greenhamcommonground.com), and another at Peace Camp, Nevada, is considering the peace camps alongside archaeological interest in the military base itself. A broad range of interests and views is represented here, and this seems to be appreciated by the majority of those whose views and memories will form the basis of our study.

The criteria for assessing heritage places traditionally give recognition to those which survive best, those with archaeological potential, with historical associations, those which are best documented etc. But increasingly social significance is being drawn into the equation. This is especially the case in Australia where the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service have explored this more than most. Research has examined the ambiguous relations between recent migrant groups (the Macedonian community, the Vietnamese) and the national parts, in an attempt to improve management of the parks and promote people’s enjoyment of them. Underlying this are the key principles of heritage as social action: As James Clifford has said, twentieth-century identities no longer presuppose continuous cultures or traditions. Everywhere individuals and groups improvise local performances from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols and languages.’ Cultures are inventive in other words and heritage officials and agencies need to keep abreast of that invention. There is a tendency to think of the heritage as something we protect, keep an eye on, restore. What Clifford refers to is the way we use heritage as a resource in the ongoing project of creating identity. Denis Byrne describes this as heritage being deployed in this aspect of social life.

We can see this to some extent in a recently completed study of wall art recorded on abandoned military bases in England. We have recorded British wall art, alongside that of German and Italian Prisoners of War, Soviet conscripts in eastern Germany, and American servicemen stationed in England during the later years of the Cold War. The American wall art often has a strong Hispanic influence, and can closely resemble the street-gangsta style graffiti of inner cities like Los Angeles from which many servicemen were recruited post-Vietnam.

There are multiple ways of protecting the sites that merit it, and for which a form of protection is appropriate or necessary – some are statutory; others not. There are incentive schemes for example, encouraging farmers to maintain historic character or preserve field monuments. Education ultimately gives owners a pride in what they own and administer, and communities an appreciation of value and meaning. By understanding and valuing things, people are better able to manage them in an appropriate way. Thus protection – in theory at least - doesn’t have to be state-led, authoritarian or bureaucratic. Locally driven initiatives could be just as effective.

Ultimately historic sites and landscape can reveal and illustrate stories about their past. But these should not be confined to a single official view of the past. Rather they should contribute to multiple narratives or what has been termed alternative histories or archaeology. As Roger Thomas has said recently, the extension of choice has affected what people consume (in education, health, leisure for example) and what they think. A greater plurality exists now in ideas, interests and belief systems than before. In the UK at least interest in the past has never been greater – so it is no surprise therefore that people think about it in many different ways. A symmetrical archaeology recognises and encourages multiple narratives.

My contention here is that symmetrical archaeology provides a useful context within which to question some of the fundamental principles of heritage management practice – why the heritage needs to be managed at all, and for whose benefit? Why some heritage places need protection; and most fundamentally of all: the past as a renewable resource; and the past, present and future as a continuous process. Increasingly those employed or engaged in heritage management practice now see the past as something we actively engage with, not something only a select group of heritage managers pontificate upon.

Return to SAA Symmetrical Archaeology Session

Back to Page