Sarah Dromgoole, ed. The Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage: National Perspectives In Light of The UNESCO Convention 2001, 2nd ed. pp. 450. $176.00 Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2006. ISBN 10: 90-04-15273-3; 13: 978-90-04-15273-1.

Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, few nations around the world felt compelled to protect historic shipwrecks and other underwater cultural heritage (UCH) from vandalism and exploitation. However, as long-lost shipwrecks became more accessible through the growing popularity of scuba diving and increasingly sophisticated underwater search and salvage technology, the need for such legislation became more apparent. Dromgoole's first edition of this book, Legal Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage: National and International Perspectives (The Hague: Kluwer, 1999), provided a much-needed look at how various nations were coming to grips with the problem through domestic legislation. In the first edition, 13 essays explored a wide variety of legislative schemes from as many nations. A final essay described the ongoing effort to create an international treaty to protect UCH in international waters.

I am grateful for the responses to the piece. With admirable concision, Professor Beebe has summarized the promise and perils of legal semiotics and the challenges ahead. He is right to note that any “moral, ethical, and political” argument can be broken down with the same tools used to break down legal argument; but one might be tempted to add that having done away with law's aura of authority and diminished the persuasive force of legal arguments may be reward enough for now, at least in the realm of cultural property argument.

The debate leading up to the ban on hunting with dogs in England and Wales in 2005 focused on the practical aspects such as the possible economic and social affect and issues of animal welfare. The relationship between hunting and the landscape was not prioritized, nor was it acknowledged that hunting contributed to regional and social identities. This article explores the relationship between hunting and landscape in the “shires” of the East Midlands, where modern hunting developed as part of the radical landscape changes experienced from the late eighteenth century. It examines why hunting is not recognized within national initiatives to map historic landscape character and suggests that the lacunae is the result of established academic agendas, which focus on long-term processes of change, to facilitate the creation of a common European landscape heritage. As a result distinctive regional identities and landscape character are ignored and the modern landscape is depoliticized.

From February 12 to 15, 2007, the Greenland National Museum & Archive convened an international and crossdisciplinary conference on repatriation of cultural heritage. Nearly 90 people attended the conference representing more than 20 different states and indigenous peoples. Based on experiences in relation to the recent return of 35,000 archaeological and ethnographic items from Denmark to the Greenlandic Home rule, the aim of the Greenlandic conference was to facilitate dialog and partnership between relevant stakeholders founded on mutual respect and understanding.

In the profoundly changing and dynamic world of contemporary audiovisual media, what has remained surprisingly unaffected is regulation. In the European Union, the new Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS), proposed by the European Commission on 13 December 2005, should allegedly rectify this situation. Amending the existing Television without Frontiers Directive, it should offer a “fresh approach” and meet the challenge of appropriately regulating media in a complex environment. It is meant to achieve a balance between the free circulation of TV broadcast and new audiovisual media and the preservation of values of cultural identity and diversity, while respecting the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality inherent to the European Community (EC). This paper examines whether and how the changes envisaged to the EC audiovisual media regime might influence cultural diversity in Europe. It addresses subseqently the question of whether the new AVMS properly safeguards the balance between competition and the public interest in this regard, or whether cultural diversity remains a mere political banner.Acknowledgements: The present study emerged from my work for the project “eDiversity: The Legal Protection of Cultural Diversity in a Digital Networked Environment,” part of the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR): Trade Regulation. This article would not have been possible without the previous work done by Christoph Beat Graber and his valuable comments. Further thanks go to Miriam Sahlfeld for critical feedback on earlier drafts and Susan Kaplan for improving the language. Any errors of fact or interpretation are my own.

This article seeks to relate hunting practices, of which some good examples have been given in this volume, to the way such practices are dealt with in the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003. The extraordinary ubiquity of hunting behavior, ritual, and representation creates an enormous field of study, which can only be touched lightly by such an international legal instrument.

This meeting was held in the city of San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, Northwest Argentina, from July 3 to 7, 2007. It was organized by the Doctorate in Human Sciences (Faculty of Humanities, Catamarca National University) and sponsored by the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), as well as by other national and international organizations. It was the fourth meeting of this nature held in South America after the fruitful ones organized at Vitória (Brazil, in 1998), Olavarría (Argentina, in 2000), and Bogotá (Colombia in 2002). As a result of these three meetings, a number of volumes were published and the first continental journal named Journal of South American Archaeology was launched as a joint publication of the National University of Catamarca (Argentina) and the University of the Cauca (Colombia).

During 2006 three major North American Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, agreed to return a significant number of antiquities to Italy. Acquisition information relating to the return of 26 items to Italy and 4 to Greece from the Getty can be added to the details known from the objects returned from Boston. A more detailed picture is emerging of how antiquities, apparently looted from Italy, were being passed through Switzerland on their way to dealers in Europe and North America. This information also points toward other antiquities that may be included in future agreements.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The authors are grateful to Karol Wight of the J. Paul Getty Museum for her willingness to check details about various pieces in Malibu. They are also grateful to Neil Brodie, Morag Kersel, and Peter Watson for comments on an earlier draft. Cass Cliatt (Princeton University), Jordan Rundgren (public relations manager, Toledo Museum of Art), and Lynette Nyman (press and public relations manager, Minneapolis Institute of Arts) kindly provided press releases relating to objects in their collections. Keith Padgham kindly assisted with checking some references.

Bibliography of books published in 2006 and of some books published earlier.

In Italy the droit de suite, introduced by the European Union (EU) Directive of 2001/84/EEC, entered into force. Legge 18 (118) (February 2006); Gazzetta ufficiale 71 (25 March 2006); Il Giornale dell'Arte, January 2006, p. 1, April 2005, p. 36. Also Germany amended the German copyright act accordingly. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 January 2006, p. 38, 28 January 2006, p. 45, as well as Austria. Handig, wirtschaftsrechtliche blätter 2006, p. 397, and in France, Le Journal des Arts 29 (April–12 May 2006): 25.

Although cultural heritage management is an inherently retrospective discipline, there is a need for strategic forward thinking. Too many valuable heritage places have been lost because they are not recognized and assessed in time. As cultural heritage management begins to examine modern structures and sites, this paper takes strategic thinking in cultural heritage management one step further and addresses the management of artifactual material created by our closest relatives, the great apes. Given the increasing understanding that chimpanzees have cultures and traditions in tool use, there is a need to recognize their heritage value in reference to human evolution.

Expanding the concept of nonhuman heritage into the future, it is now also time to explore how to deal with the artifacts that the first artificial intelligence (AI)-imbued, self-reflecting robots will create. By extension, which artifacts will be kept along the way? The contemplation of the role of nonhuman heritage will ultimately foster a reappraisal of human heritage. The article outlines some of the conceptual issues that must be addressed if our heritage is to have an ethical future.*Institute of Land, Water and Society. Email: e-mail dspennemann@csu.edu.au

Cultural heritage law is growing up in a paradoxical environment of global discourse. One might think that the amazing advancements in information technology and the gradual emergence of civil society throughout the world would help ensure more effective diplomacy and international collaboration to protect cultural material. Instead, the discourse about issues of cultural heritage too often reflects the worst of international relations in today's world: Diplomacy remains polarized and the legal framework adversarial. Afghanistan's recent experience is a case in point.

This book is the second in the series of cultural heritage studies initiated by the University Press of Florida with Paul Shackel of the University of Maryland as the series editor. The series explores the uses of heritage and the meaning of its cultural forms as a way to interpret the present and the past. The first title in the series is Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown: Reshaping Archaeological Assessment and Significance (2005). Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and the Antiquities Trade enumerates the ways that commodifying artifacts fuels the destruction of archaeological heritage and considers what can be done to protect it. The title of the book is apt. Archaeology is the bedrock of material cultural heritage, and it is illegal archaeology by looters or subsistence diggers that fuels the burgeoning trade in illicitly excavated artifacts.