Economists, political scientists, and journalists around the world have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will have long-term effects on twenty-first-century global society. As a precipitating factor in the final collapse of the post-1945 world order, the pandemic has been seen as an epochal turning point in human history. This article will examine the long-term effects that the pandemic may have on the protection and promotion of cultural heritage, which has become a major economic and political undertaking in the post-World War II era, with earlier roots in elite aesthetics and the rise of mass tourism in the nineteenth century. This article will identify some dramatic changes in economic activity and politics that may transform the social role of cultural heritage in the coming decades.

The global digital environment and the continuous expansion of digital information about cultural property necessitate a reevaluation of John Henry Merryman’s tripartite typology of cultural property ideals. Merryman put forth those ideals, namely 1.) ensuring the physical preservation of cultural property, 2.) protecting its even-handed interpretation, and 3.) offering public access to cultural property, as the main bases for the settlement of international cultural property disputes. However, new questions have arisen about the status of cultural property in an era when detailed virtual copies of cultural property are instantaneously available. For example, to what extent is digitized cultural property data should itself be regarded as cultural property? This paper will address some of the ethical issues related to the physical preservation, interpretation, and access to this digitized cultural property data. It will conclude with an examination of another type of cultural heritage data: the increasing use of behavioral data about cultural property consumers and audiences as a marketing tool by cultural institutions. This ominous new turn in the commodification of cultural property, it will be suggested, identifies items of cultural significance not only as objects of ownership and sale, but also as a marketable entertainment experience.

In this elegant and wide-ranging essay, Hamilakis and Yalouri have offered us a sophisticated analysis of the utilisation of the ancient past in modern Greece. They have traced the powerful political connection between images of the past and contemporary political structures. They have described how different modalities of veneration have been conscripted for this task. Yet I want to offer a few conceptual clarifications and highlight some possible alternative social contexts that may – I hope – strengthen the central points that they make. These concern a tendency to reify ‘religion’ (specifically in this case specifically Greek Orthodoxy as a unitary phenomenon) and to privilege nationalism as the only socio-political behaviour that actively utilises the cultural capital of archaeology. The two points are closely related. For while the nationalistic use of archaeology may mimic the external forms and even literary topoi of religious veneration, State and Church are potentially competing power structures within a particular society. In many places, the cultural tensions between State and Church (or between rival States and Churches) are becoming increasingly intense. The recognition of those tensions may help us more effectively to problematise—to use Hamilakis and Yalouri's phrase—the socio-politics of archaeology.

The Fourth Annual Ename International Colloquium, entitled “Between Objects and Ideas: Rethinking the Role of Intangible Heritage,” was held in Ghent, Belgium, March 26–28, 2008. Focusing on the intellectual and practical relationship between tangible and intangible heritage and its implications for the shaping of international heritage policy, it featured 40 speakers representing universities, museums, universities, and heritage organizations in Belgium, Canada, China, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Thailand, Turkey, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As in previous years, the colloquium was organized by the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation, with support from the Province of East Flanders.

The Battles of Armageddon is a meticulous chronicle of the dozens of military clashes over the centuries that have given an aura of apocalyptic expectation to a small patch of valley in northern Israel. Television-evangelists and Bible-thumpers all over the world continue to whip up their followers with nightmarish visions of nuclear disaster and divine judgment linked to the ominous word “Armageddon.” But for those who care to dig a little deeper, Eric H. Cline of The George Washington University masterfully shows us that a long, violent, and tangled history lies behind that name. Cline systematically reveals the millennium-long steps by which certain arbitrary topographic realities, unchanging military technologies, and the relative geographical positions of the great Near Eastern empires made the site of Megiddo—and indeed all of the Jezreel Valley—a tragically tiresome cockpit of war.