Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

World Heritage Sites: Places of Conflict, or of Peace?

By Michael A. Di Giovine

UNESCO’s World Heritage sites, particularly those in hotspots of geopolitical conflict, have been in the news this past month. The Wall Street Journal published a photo essay on some of the most recently designated sites. And while the Palestinian Authority reportedly has nominated Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity—believed to be Jesus’ birthplace—to the prestigious World Heritage List, Cambodians and Thais have engaged in bloody shootouts that have left nearly 10 dead over the remote Khmer temple of Preah Vihear. What are these sites and why do they captivate the imaginations, and ideologies, of so many people?

Ratified in 1972, the World Heritage Convention designates local places of historical, cultural, or artistic interest as “universal heritage.” In The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage, and Tourism, I argue that this is not empty political maneuvering, but rather a way to foster “peace in the minds of men”, as the Preamble to UNESCO’s Constitution urges, by creating a vast heritage-scape that is bound together by these places of universal significance. Mixing such different sites together, the heritage-scape makes it clear that what unifies all of us is our diversity.

Why do countries agree to “give up” their locality to the universality of the heritage-scape, and adopt the costly regulations UNESCO imposes? Contrary to public belief, a designation does not win the country funding—which is disbursed on a case-by-case basis for training. Rather, these countries respond to the prestige factor associated with site designation.

Just being on the List not only adds value to a nation-state (“we have one of the most important places in the world!”), but allows some of the smallest countries to be counted with the big ones, equating lesser-known monuments like Preah Vihear with popular places such as Venice and Angkor Wat. Without discounting any of the good intensions on the part of the Palestinian Authority, this certainly is a motivating factor: getting on the list means sitting at the same table as other countries; it is one step closer to being recognized as a legitimate state. The fact that Palestine has chosen a (non-Muslim) site important to many Westerners to represent itself on the global stage is therefore no accident; rather, it is a way of claiming to share in Western heritage, and to be its ally rather than its enemy.

While Palestine is betting on a site that is not fully considered “Palestinian” by its people, most World Heritage sites are deeply rooted in the culture and ideology of a nation-state. Many, like Preah Vihear, are claimed by multiple countries. A 9th-century monastery straddling a long-contested portion of the Thai-Cambodian border (its main structure is in Cambodia, but it’s only accessible through Thailand), Preah Vihear was designated for Cambodia in 2008 after a deal was brokered between the now-deposed Thai government of Thaksin Shinawatra and Cambodia’s Hun Sen. The Thai opposition party immediately stoked intense local feelings for Preah Vihear, setting in motion a series of uprisings and coups that toppled Shinawatra’s government and continues to this day.

UNESCO could have handled the situation differently by not attributing an “owner” country to Preah Vihear (like Jerusalem), or, better, by requiring both countries to share the temple (there are already several so-called “transnational sites”). The latter would have the added value of diplomatically illustrating UNESCO’s peacemaking claims of “unity in diversity.” Provided it joins the World Heritage Convention, the Palestinian Authority’s request can provide UNESCO with a second chance to truly foster peace diplomatically; let’s hope the Church of the Nativity fares better than Preah Vihear—it has unfortunately seen enough combat already.

Michael A. Di Giovine is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago, a former tour operator, and the author of The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage, and Tourism. He is currently researching heritage, pilgrimage and cultural revitalization associated with the cult of Catholic saint and stigmatic, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.

The Author of Digging Through the Bible Tentatively Scheduled to Appear on ABC Nightline

The ABC Nightline program tentatively scheduled for August 31, 11:30 EST will feature an interview with Dr Richard Freund, the author of Digging Through the Bible: Understanding Biblical People, Places, and Controversies through Archeology, on the topic of Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments. John Donvan, the Nightline host, read Dr Freund's book and visited the site where Freund worked in 2007 and identified as the true Mount Sinai.

Fall Event Schedule for Richard Freund's Digging through the Bible

Here is the fall schedule for Richard Freund's Digging Through the Bible: Understanding Biblical People, Places, and Controversies through Archaeology.

• October 29-Nov. 1 - Batchelder Conference - Omaha
• November 15 - Temple Emunah - Gerald Stechler - Boston
• November 20 - Society of Biblical Literature - New Orleans
• December 20 - Association for Jewish Studies - Los Angeles
• December 21 - University of California at San Diego - Holocaust Living Workshop - San Diego

Marching on In Amelia Earhart’s Shoes: an Update on Research

By Tom King

Back on October 5, 2007, I reported here briefly on the 2007 expedition to Nikumaroro Island, continuing the research reported in the Altamira Press book Amelia Earhart’s Shoes. I’d like to update that report a little.

Readers will recall that our research is aimed at determining what happened to aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, when they disappeared over the Pacific in July of 1937. In a nutshell, we think they wound up on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the Phoenix group of islands, part of today’s Republic of Kiribati but In those days part of the Crown Colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Our work is sponsored by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), whose website, is the place to go for up-to-the-minute news and a wealth of background material. The 2007 expedition was our seventh to the island, and its primary focus was on the “Seven Site.” This is a location near the southeast end of the island, where colonial documents indicate a partial human skeleton was found in 1940, together with a sextant box with numbers on it, a woman’s shoe, and a few other artifacts, as well as evidence of a fire in which birds and turtles had been cooked. In 2001 we carried out fieldwork at the site, finding the remains of fires with bird, fish, and turtle bones, and a number of artifacts indicating that someone had been camping there in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

In 2007 we cleared the dense brush off a large area of the Seven Site, and found the remains of more fires. We scanned the area closely for human bones and teeth, and found none, but we did find a number of other suggestive artifacts. At the time of my October 5, 2007 report, analysis of what we brought back was just beginning. It’s been a slow process, since we’re entirely supported by volunteer work and contributed funding, but we’re at the point where I can report the following results.

1. A shard of beveled glass found on the site turned out to match another shard found in 2001, and together they very closely match the size, thickness and shape of a mirror from a 1930s woman’s compact.
2. Three small tabular lumps of red material found in two separate fire features have been subjected to chemical analysis; their chemistry is consistent with that of early twentieth century cosmetic rouge. The three lumps fit easily into the outline of the rouge compartment in a 1930s compact.
3. A piece of a pocket knife – one end of the knife and one of the thin metal strips that forms one side of one of the blade compartments – has been identified as coming from a bone handled jackknife produced by the Imperial Cutlery Company of Providence, Rhode Island sometime between 1930 and 1945. A similar knife is in the inventory of material recorded as being on Earhart’s plane prior to her world flight, but this type of knife was extremely common during World War II. Interestingly, the piece shows evidence of having been used as an informal prying tool, after the knife itself came apart.
4. Analysis of fishbone from the two fire features indicate exploitation of a broad range of easily available reef and lagoon species, with no indication of a focus on species usually favored by Pacific island populations. Moreover, whoever ate the fish did not consume the heads, which are usually regarded by Pacific Island people as delicacies. The faunal assemblage also includes a number of baby sea turtle bones, and the remains of one or more brown boobies; birdbone analysis is still underway, however.
5. One of the fire features contained the fragmented remains of two partly melted bottles, both of which had apparently been standing upright in the fire. One was an amber returnable beer bottle of probable pre-World War II origin; the other was a green bottle of a size and shape consistent with medicinal or cosmetic use, with an embossed patent number dating the bottle to sometime after 1933. We think the bottles may represent an attempt to purify water by boiling.
6. Both fire features contained many fragments of badly rusted ferrous metal, which appear to represent metal containers and/or cooking equipment.
7. Part of a zipper – the “pull” found on the surface of the site turns out to have been manufactured by Talon, an American company, in the 1930s. It was apparently not military in origin.
8. Perhaps most intriguingly, and the major focus of current research, is a fragmented lump of brown material sifted out of the excavation at one of the fire features. This turned out – to our considerable surprise – to be fecal material, and to contain human DNA. Analysis is continuing, by Molecular World, Inc. of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Meanwhile, we’ve done further study of the numbers on the sextant box described in 1940 as having been found with the human bones, probably at the Seven Site. The box itself was lost in Fiji sometime after 1941. Comparative analysis provides strong indications that it held an early 20th century nautical sextant made by the Brandis Instrument Company and acquired by the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War I. Many such sextants were adapted by the Navy for aviation use, and were probably sold as surplus in the 1920s.

Incidentally, Google Earth now has excellent, fairly up-to-date imagery of Nikumaroro, though under its old colonial name of “Gardner Island.” You can view the Seven Site by navigating to 4o41’08.30”S, 174o29’48.34”W.

Details on the ongoing analysis will appear from time to time in TIGHAR’s newsletter, TIGHAR Tracks, and on its website. A full archaeological report and summary journal article are in preparation, pending the completion of analyses in progress. No further expeditions are planned at the moment, due to scarce finances, though there is certainly more fieldwork that could usefully be done. Nikumaroro, incidentally, is part of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, featured last year in National Geographic. Its ecosystem is delicate, as are its archaeological sites, and it must be visited with care. Since it is very expensive to get there (by chartered ship), it has thus far not suffered too much from human use.

Tom King is the author of the Altamira Press textbooks Cultural Resource Laws and Practice, Federal Planning and Historic Places, Thinking About Cultural Resource Management, and Places That Count; he is also the co-author of Amelia Earhart’s Shoes. His latest book, elaborating on the points in this discussion, is Our Unprotected Heritage, published by Left Coast Press.

The Corruption of Cultural Resource Management and Environmental Impact Assessment, and What To Do About It.

By Tom King

Over the last couple of decades I’ve written four textbooks for Altamira Press (one now in its 3rd edition) dealing with aspects of cultural resource management (CRM) and its kissing cousin environmental impact assessment (EIA). CRM involves managing the impacts of the modern world on those aspects of the environment that are held to have cultural value – including things like old buildings, archaeological sites, and indigenous spiritual places, but lots of other pieces of the world around us as well. EIA addresses the same kinds of impacts on the entire environment.

We’re about to inaugurate a new national administration that is rather explicitly “green,” so the future should be rosy for CRM and EIA, but I’m afraid this is not necessarily so at all.

What’s Wrong With CRM and EIA

The problem – in my view – is this: the practices of CRM and EIA have become so corrupted that they no longer do what they’re supposed to do. They no longer give decision makers a fair picture of what the environmental impacts may be of decisions they’re getting ready to make. Instead, they often lull government agencies and the public alike into thinking that all’s well with a proposed project, while serious environmental impacts are swept under the rug. This may be a more serious problem with “green” projects like solar arrays and wind farms than with other kinds of projects, because of the tacit assumption that because these projects are “good,” they cannot possibly do anything “bad.” But a wind farm can destroy the view from a tribal spiritual site just as readily as a coal mine can, and a solar array can interrupt the spread of sunlight over desert plants. These kinds of impacts need to be considered in deciding whether and how to proceed with a project – not necessarily to stop the project, but to allow it to be designed so as to minimize the damage.

Current law and regulations – the stuff I’ve written about at such length in my textbooks – no longer does a fair job of ensuring that such impacts are taken into account. There are four big problem areas.

1. The consulting firms that do EIA and CRM work have come to understand themselves to be parts of their clients’ planning teams, and their clients are almost invariably the proponents of the very projects whose impacts they’re analyzing. Their analyses, results, and interactions with others (regulators, the public, etc.) cannot help but be influenced by this relationship, and they are.
2. The federal agencies that are responsible for complying with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) have become proponents not only for their own projects but for those planned by supplicants for federal assistance and permits. These agencies have by and large come to regard EIA and CRM as ways of “clearing” projects for implementation by showing that their environmental impacts are negligible, regardless of the relationship of the projects’ actual effects.
3. The agencies that are supposed to oversee EIA and CRM to keep the systems honest no longer do so. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), and other ostensible overseers and standard setters have become obsessed with “streamlining” their review systems, and no longer provide serious, critical oversight. A few such agencies – notably in my experience the State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs) – can vehemently defend their own prerogatives and promote rigid adherence to technical standards, but seem impervious to larger policy matters.
4. The EIA/CRM review systems have become largely impervious to the public. They are convoluted; they are laden with esoteric concepts and jargon; they provide limited opportunities for public “input” and if someone from the “outside” does express concerns, the systems provide no guarantee whatever that they will be thoughtfully considered. Quite the contrary; the systems are neatly set up so that agencies can, for the most part, simply inform people of plans, solicit their input, and then ignore whatever they get.

We EIA and CRM practitioners have largely accepted these attributes of contemporary EIA and CRM as simply “the way things are” – to such an extent that many of us don’t even think of them as problems. We are, we think, supposed to be public relations specialists, making our clients’ projects look good whether they are or not. This has to change; there is simply no reason for the public to support a system of “impact assessment” that permits impacts to be ignored.

What’s To Be Done?

The problems I’ve just outlined spring from three underlying factors, expressed in the evolution of the EIA and CRM systems over the forty years or so since they were put in place by NEPA and NHPA.

1. Although the statutes lay out national policies favoring giving the environment and cultural resources a fair shake, neither the laws nor the regulations that have sprung from them provide clear direction about applying such policies. We are told in great detail about the procedures to employ, but little or nothing about how to make these procedures accomplish anything.


2. The statutes, and to a considerable extent the regulations, are painfully naïve. They assume integrity and vision on the part of federal agencies. However much we might wish it to be otherwise, such assumptions are never safe.


3. Public involvement has never been well provided for under NEPA, and in recent years it has become largely a laughing matter. The CRM regulations implementing Section 106 of NHPA are better on paper, but in practice, they are today little better than the NEPA regulations. Concerned members of the public can comment on things, but actually negotiating with project proponents about how to minimize impacts has become largely a thing of the past even under Section 106 – unless one is a State Historic Preservation Officer.

The good news, though, is that such problems can be fixed. In various contexts, I’ve offered the following recommendations to the new administration:

The President should issue an executive order directing all federal agencies to revise their procedures for compliance with laws like NEPA and NHPA to ensure in principle that impact assessments done and reports prepared are unbiased either for or against whatever is being reviewed. Some specific ways to make this happen include:

a. Doing impact analyses of all kinds using consultants who have no economic or other links to project proponents

b. Providing for thorough independent review of any impact assessment work carried out by or on behalf of project proponents.

c. Giving thorough analytic consideration to alternative ways of achieving a project’s purposes, notably including alternatives proposed by members of the public.

d. Providing for real, face-to-face, back-and-forth consultation with interested members of the public, aimed at reaching agreements about whether and how to proceed with a selected alternative – though always with provision for making a decision in the absence of agreement.

e. Paying attention to the full range of potential effects – direct effects, indirect effects, and very importantly, cumulative effects.

f. Addressing not only impacts that can be quantified but those that can’t – for example, many kinds of effects on cultural and spiritual values in the environment.

g. Coordinating analyses and consultations under all the various relevant laws – NEPA, NHPA, the Endangered Species Act, and so on, to allow all concerned to understand the synergistic relationships among impacts.

h. Providing training for all involved in EIA and CRM, and promoting cooperative arrangements to maintain high-quality interdisciplinary research and consultative standards.

i. Regular performance monitoring so that corrections can be made in analyses and consultations going awry.

j. Finally, using impact analysis results when decisions are actually made. Agencies should have to be able to show that their decisions are consistent with the policies adopted by Congress in enacting NEPA, NHPA, and the other environmental laws, or explain in detail why any inconsistencies exist.

The same executive order, or another, could direct the oversight agencies – the Council on Environmental Quality, Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and others -- to rework their regulations to make them consistent with one another, simple enough for citizens to understand and work with, transparent to public scrutiny, and encouraging to full public involvement in review processes. To the extent these goals couldn’t be achieved through regulatory changes, the agencies could propose changes to the laws themselves (which are almost certainly needed, but this ought not be pursued until regulatory changes have been tried.

There’s plenty more that could be done, but these relatively modest steps would, I think, take us a long way toward putting a functional EIA/CRM system in place. And we should take these steps, quickly – before we find our broken system of impact assessment creating unnecessary conflicts between “green” developments and preserving the quality of our natural and cultural environment.

Tom King is the author of the Altamira Press textbooks Cultural Resource Laws and Practice, Federal Planning and Historic Places, Thinking About Cultural Resource Management, and Places That Count; he is also the co-author of Amelia Earhart’s Shoes. His latest book, elaborating on the points in this discussion, is Our Unprotected Heritage, published by Left Coast Press.