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This volume analyzes the politics, policy and practice of cultural heritage at the global level, identifying the major directions in which international heritage practice is moving, and exploring the key issues likely to shape the cultural heritage field well into the twenty-first century. It examines the tensions between the universal claims of much heritage practice, particularly that associated with the World Heritage system, and national and local perspectives. It explores the international legal framework developed since World War Two to protect heritage, particularly at times of war, and from theft, showing how contemporary global problems of conflict and illicit trade continue to challenge the international legal system. Heritage and Globalisation critiques the incorporation of heritage in the world economy through the policies of international development organisations and the global tourism trade. It also approaches heritage from seldom-considered perspectives, as a form of aid, as a development paradigm, and as a form of sustainable practice. The book identifies some of the most pressing issues likely to face the heritage industry at a global level in coming decades, including the threat posed by climate change and the need for poverty reduction. Providing a historically and theoretically rigorous approach to heritage as a form of and manifestation of globalisation, the volume’s emphasis is on contemporary issues and new fields for heritage practice. Part 1: Global and Local Tensions 1. The Magic List of Global Status: UNESCO, World Heritage and the Agendas of States Marc Askew 2. Politics and Power: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) as World Heritage Olwen Beazley 3. World Heritage, Authencity and Post-authenticity: International and National Perspectives Sophoa Labadi 4. An Ivory Bull Head from Afghanistan: Legal and Ethical Dilemmas in National and Globalized Heritage Juliette van Krieken-Pieters 5. Globalizing Intangible Cultural Heritage? Between International Arenas and Local Aappropriations Chiara Bortolotto Part 2: Heritage, Development and Globalisation 6. Heritage Tourism: The Dawn of a New Era? Tim Winter 7. The Glocalisation of Heritage through Tourism: Balancing Standardization and Differentiation Noel Salazar 8. The Business of Heritage and the Private Sector Fiona Starr Part 3: The Future of the Past: Twenty-first Century Challenges 9. Cultural Heritage and the Global Environmental Ccrisis Colin Long and Anita Smith 10. Conflict Heritage and Expert Failure Lynn Meskell 11. Material Heritage and Poverty Reduction Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels 'Almost every researcher, teacher, and student working in the field of heritage studies will find this collection a valuable source of information and inspiration, and it should also be required reading for politicians, heritage professionals, and community activists developing strategies for the coming decade.' – Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites

Understanding the causes and consequences of wildfires in forests of the western United States requires integrated information about fire, climate changes, and human activity on multiple temporal scales. We use sedimentary charcoal accumulation rates to construct long-term variations in fire during the past 3,000 y in the American West and compare this record to independent fire-history data from historical records and fire scars. There has been a slight decline in burning over the past 3,000 y, with the lowest levels attained during the 20th century and during the Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1400–1700 CE [Common Era]). Prominent peaks in forest fires occurred during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (ca. 950–1250 CE) and during the 1800s. Analysis of climate reconstructions beginning from 500 CE and population data show that temperature and drought predict changes in biomass burning up to the late 1800s CE. Since the late 1800s , human activities and the ecological effects of recent high fire activity caused a large, abrupt decline in burning similar to the LIA fire decline. Consequently, there is now a forest \"fire deficit\" in the western United States attributable to the combined effects of human activities, ecological, and climate changes. Large fires in the late 20th and 21st century fires have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow.

Questions: Functional interactions between fire and fire-dependent plant communities have been considered to select for increased community flammability. We address this concept by resolving: (a) can fossil pollen records be used to examine past variations in functional attributes; (b) can community-level, functional responses to fire be obtained by coupling fire history with pollen derived plant traits; and (c) has directional selection promoted attributes that increase community flammability? Location: Breitenbush Lake, Oregon, USA. Methods: We developed a framework based on ecological understanding of functional traits and pollen records to analyse variations in functional attribute expressions through time. Fire-related functional attributes that indicate sensitivity to changes in fire activity were identified and associated with taxa from a pollen record. Results: Nine of the 14 functional attributes were significantly related to fire frequency (number of fires 1,000 per year). When combined with fire history data, variation in the abundances of functional attributes suggest selection of plant community expressions that indicate community-level responses to fire related to changes in structural development and changes in fire adaptation. Fire frequency variations may drive directional selection for fire-adapted attributes, and against fire-sensitive attributes. Our results indicate increased Holocene fire activity may have been linked to vegetation functional interactions with fire. Conclusions: Our method of combining paleoecological data with functional traits allowed reconstruction of community-level changes in the expression of functional characteristics, providing evidence on structural development and changes in fire adaptation. Our results (a) highlight the capacity of paleoecological records to track plant community trait composition; (b) provide novel information on fire–vegetation relationships, independent of and complementary to conventional methods of disturbance-based paleoecological interpretations; (c) suggest the Holocene fire trend may be linked to the type of biomass being burned through directional selection; and (d) suggest an application that may be applied to quantify community responses to various disturbances across broad temporal and spatial scales.

Global climate change poses significant threats to the Caribbean islands. Yet, little is known about the long-term disturbance regimes in island ecosystems. This research investigates 2000 yr of natural and anthropogenic fire disturbance through the analysis of a latitudinal transect of sediment records from coastal salt ponds in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). The two research objectives in this study are (1) to determine the fire regime history for the BVI over the last 2000 yr and (2) to explore ecological impacts from anthropogenic landscape modification pre- and post-European settlement. The magnitude of anthropogenic landscape modification, including the introduction of agriculture, was investigated through a multiproxy approach using sedimentary records of fossil pollen and charcoal. Our results suggest fire regimes from Belmont Pond, Thatch Island, and Skeleton Pond have been influenced by human activity, particularly during the postsettlement era, from 500 cal yr BP to modern. Our results suggest that fire regimes during the Medieval Climate Anomaly were responding to changes in climate via dominant atmospheric drivers. The presettlement fire regimes from these islands suggest that fires occurred every 90 to 120 yr. This research represents a significant data contribution to a region with little disturbance and vegetation data available.

We used pollen and high-resolution charcoal analysis of lake sediment to reconstruct a 7600 yr vegetation and fire history from Anthony Lake, located in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. From 7300 to 6300 cal yr BP, the forest was composed primarily of Populus, and fire was common, indicating warm, dry conditions. From 6300 to 3000 cal yr BP, Populus declined as Pinus and Picea increased in abundance and fire became less frequent, suggesting a shift to cooler, wetter conditions. From 3000 cal yr BP to present, modern-day forests composed of Pinus and Abies developed, and from 1650 cal yr BP to present, fires increased. We utilized the modern climate-analogue approach to explain the potential synoptic climatological processes associated with regional fire. The results indicate that years with high fire occurrence experience positive 500 mb height anomalies centered over the Great Basin, with anomalous southerly component of flow delivering dry air into the region and with associated sinking motions to further suppress precipitation. It is possible that such conditions became more common over the last 1650 cal yr BP, supporting an increase in fire despite the shift to more mesic conditions.

The eruption of Mt Mazama, c. 7630 yr BP, was the largest North American volcanic event during the Holocene. High-resolution pollen and charcoal analyses were used to examine the impact of Mt Mazama tephra on forest vegetation and possible synergistic interactions with fire activity in the Central Oregon Cascade Range. We selected four small watersheds on a longitudinal transect north of Mt Mazama and recovered lake sediment that spanned the period of tephra deposition. Our sediment records had between 14 and 50 cm of tephra deposited, and we analyzed the sediment at centimeter resolution before and after the deposition horizon in each sediment record. Our analysis shows that nonarboreal pollen percentages and accumulation rates were depressed after Mazama tephra deposition. Recovery to pre-tephra deposition rates occurred after approximately 50–100 years. Arboreal pollen percentage and accumulation rates were less severely impacted, suggesting that the Mazama tephra deposition disrupted understory communities more significantly than overstory species, and that forest communities returned to their pre-tephra-deposition conditions after approximately 50–100 years. Fire events in conjunction with the Mazama tephra occurred in two of the four sites, suggesting that tephra deposition did not create conditions that precipitated a fire event in a consistent way. This research reinforces the notion that disturbance events may have cumulative effects on forest vegetation, but that the impacts of disturbance events need to be felt by similar constituents of the forest ecosystem to be truly additive.

QUESTION: As anthropogenic change pushes ecosystems towards historically novel states, understanding how landscape disturbances interact with climate variability becomes increasingly important. We reconstructed the Holocene vegetation and fire history of a small watershed to investigate the linkages among disturbance regimes, biogeochemical cycling and ecosystem structure. Specifically we asked: (i) how do compositional and structural changes in forest ecosystems modify fire regimes; and (ii) how do changes in fuel type and fire regimes impact biogeochemical cycling? LOCATION: Comstock Lake, Wisconsin, USA, a small kettle lake at the modern prairie–forest ecotone in the Great Lakes Region of North America. METHODS: We analysed a lacustrine sediment core from Comstock Lake, Wisconsin, for paleoecological proxies including charcoal quantity and morphotype, pollen composition, magnetic susceptibility, organic matter concentration and stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes. These paleoecological variables were used to reconstruct climate‐mediated shifts in vegetation, fire disturbance and biogeochemical cycling during the last 13 200 calendar years before present (cal yr BP). RESULTS: Forest composition in the landscape surrounding Comstock Lake varied among coniferous forest, deciduous forest and savanna over the Holocene. Independent of the vegetation changes, five distinct fire regimes were identified, ranging from frequent, low‐intensity surface fires to infrequent, high‐intensity crown fires. The main feature of our vegetation reconstruction is a shift from Pinus to Quercus forest that occurred between 10 000 and 11 000 cal yr BP. However, changes in fuel source and forest structure were apparently more important than shifts of species composition in determining fire regimes. We observed an inverse relationship between non‐arboreal fuel sources and biomass burning throughout all five fire regimes. The biogeochemical consequences of fires were apparent during some, but not all regime transitions. Generally, the sediments were composed of relatively small clastic inputs from the catchment and mostly autochthonous organic sources. CONCLUSION: The location of Comstock Lake on the prairie–forest boundary meant that regional climate signals during the Holocene were filtered through vegetation. Both compositional changes in dominant tree taxa and structural changes in canopy openness influenced fire regimes.

Pollen and high-resolution charcoal records from three lakes were examined to reconstruct the vegetation and fire history of the Oregon Coast Range for the last 9000 years. The sites are located along a north-to-south effective precipitation gradient and changes in vegetation and fire activity provided information on the nature of this gradient in the past. The relation of vegetation to climate change was examined at millennial timescales and the relation between fire and climate was examined on centennial timescales by comparing fire-interval distribution and fire synchrony between sites. The pollen data indicate more fire-adapted vegetation during the early-Holocene period ( c. 9000 to 6700 cal. yr BP), followed by a shift to forests with more fire-sensitive taxa in the mid Holocene (c. 6700 cal. yr BP to 2700 cal. yr BP) and modern forest assemblages developing over the last c. 2700 years. Comparisons of fire-interval distributions showed that the time between fires was similar between two of the three combinations of sites, suggesting that the moisture gradient has played an important role in determining long-term fire frequency. However, century-scale synchrony of fire occurrence between the two sites with the largest difference in effective precipitation suggests that centennial-scale shifts in climate may have overcome the environmental differences between these locations. Asynchrony in fire occurrence between the sites with more similar effective precipitation implies that local conditions may have played an important role in determining fire synchrony between sites with similar long-term climate histories.

This paper examines the interpretation of the World Heritage city Luang Prabang (the former royal capital of Laos), investigating the relationships between the goals and strategies of international organizations such as UNESCO and the priorities of the Lao state. Refuting the idea that the World Heritage system represents a form of cultural globalization, the authors instead suggest that there is a marked convergence of the interests of international heritage bodies managing World Heritage and the Lao authorities anxious to portray a particular vision of national identity through selective recognition of cultural heritage locations.