Street signs in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic, installed in the twenty-first century, mark Palermo's former Jewish quarter, over half a millennium since Sicily last had a substantial Jewish population. They recall a medieval Jewish minority, but also symbolise what some consider to be Palermo's essentially pluralistic character. What motivates this inchoate revival of ‘Jewish space’, and what does it mean for contemporary Palermo? ‘Rebranding’ Palermo as a crossroads of civilisations encourages tourism, but this alone does not explain the re-evaluation of its multi-religious heritage. Palermo is an often-overlooked case study for the contemporary emergence of Jewish ‘sites of memory’. Using a micro-scale ethnographic study to analyse a narrative rooted in history, I show how the ‘rediscovery’ of Jewish history can have multiple catalysts. In Palermo, these include a Europe-wide interest in ‘things Jewish’, and Sicily's increasing religious diversity in the present.

In March 2023 the EU-funded CHERISH project published its free user-guide and methodology for investigating heritage and climate change in the coastal and maritime environment (Barker and Corns 2023). This paper provides an overview of the publication, specifically the CHERISH toolkit – the 15 approaches employed by the multi-disciplinary project to investigate at-risk heritage sites in Wales and Ireland. Using the eroding coastal hillfort of Dinas Dinlle in Wales as a case study, the toolkit which combines air, land and sea-based investigation techniques is highlighted. This article will assist users going forward in identifying relevant approaches to the study of their own at-risk sites. It is relevant to a wide-ranging audience anywhere in the world, taking into consideration a variety of requirements such as the environment, budget, and outputs.

Examining the graveside tributes left at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, this article considers the meaning-making work of decay. Green-Wood is a polysemous place, existing as a historical and active cemetery, an arboretum, an arts and performance space, a space of mourning, and a place of leisurely strolling and birdwatching. Through a site-specific analysis of the cemetery, I approach decay as an active and durational phase of material life and explore different decay-temporalities through the tributes left graveside. I argue that orienting ourselves to the decay-life of things necessarily entangles us in a larger ecological ethic and relational ontology of self, land, weather, animals (human and non-human), and time. While advocating for material attention to decay-life, I consider how the aesthetics and taboos of decay shape the cemetery’s relationship to visible and invisible rot and ruin. The cemetery staff, wildlife, visitors, ecology, climate, and the dead create a complex network of active actors experiencing and altering the material decay-life of the left-behind natural and artificial material tributes. Together, this active and entangled decay-life of the site forms a network of temporalities of decay that co-construct the affective and environmental space of the cemetery.

Antarctica is often cast as a last wilderness, untouched by humans and set aside for peace and science. Yet it also has a nuclear past that foreshadowed a shift in human interactions with the continent, away from development and towards protection. This paper examines the discourse around the installation and the dismantlement of PM-3A, the first and only large-scale nuclear reactor to have been used on the Antarctic continent. Affectionately known as “Nukey Poo,” the reactor was greeted with optimism by the USA and was seen as a catalyst for a more comfortable and technologically advanced future for the humans at McMurdo Station. This techno-optimism spurred visions of a resource-rich Antarctic future. When it became apparent a decade on that the reactor was too costly and had been leaking, the narration shifted to centre on environmental protection, resulting in the removal of a mountainside of gravel in the name of ecological restoration. The reactor is gone, but not forgotten – the site is designated as a Historic Site and Monument under the Antarctic Treaty System. Spanning from the Cold War to the Madrid Protocol era, the story of Nukey Poo provides a useful lens through which to track the evolution of attitudes towards Antarctica and to reflect on imagined Antarctic futures.

This article explores the decolonization of heritage politics in 1970s Hong Kong. It firstly revisits recent scholars’ work on Hong Kong heritage politics and the transformation of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. It shows how people’s perceptions of their colonial heritage and history in Hong Kong have changed since the 1970s. Secondly, it outlines the city’s cultural heritage policy framework after the 1967 Riots, inspired by the Cultural Revolution. It analyses how the colonial government intentionally rebranded the city’s colonial heritage as an anachronism to justify its new narrative of Hong Kong and its cultural identity in the 1970s. It also employs the demolition of the former Kowloon Railway Station building in the 1970s as a case study to discuss how the colonial government decolonized local colonial structures through its new cultural heritage policy approach after the Riots. Finally, by employing the case study of the demolished Central Star Ferry Pier in the 2000s, this article argues there was a change in people’s perceptions of the city’s colonial history in the early postcolonial period of Hong Kong. A more active notion of Hong Kong’s cultural identity is also being articulated in the uncertain future due to the city’s recent rapid political and social changes influenced by the mainland authority.

There is increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledges have considerable potential to enhance collective understandings of and improve responses to complex ecological threats, such as those to cultural heritage from climate change. At the same time, it appears that Indigenous peoples face structural barriers to participation in international organisations that advance knowledge about those problems. Using the conceptual framework of boundary organisations (BOs) theory and case studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and UNESCO, I argue that the lack of meaningful Indigenous engagement in international knowledge institutions is not just an ethical problem; it also undermines the effectiveness of their assessments. The future success of their boundary work partly depends on further engagement with Indigenous stakeholders. At least at the heritage–climate change nexus, the salience, legitimacy, and credibility of IPCC and UNESCO assessments require substantive Indigenous representation alongside other state/non-state parties. Successful experiences in biodiversity governance indicate that incorporating the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) would enhance Indigenous engagement in UNESCO and the IPCC.

We present case studies on three objects of high importance for cultural heritage in southern Poland, dated in years 2018–2022 at the Gliwice 14C and Mass Spectrometry Laboratory with radiocarbon (14C) and dendrochronology methods. The first was a richly ornamented wooden cane, discovered during excavations on the market in Bytom city. The cane can be associated with medieval court proceedings. The archaeological context indicates the 13th century AD, and the 14C result corresponds perfectly with this time, confirming that it is the oldest object of this type in Poland. The second was a 4-m-tall oak column from St. Leonard Church in Lipnica Murowana, a UNESCO heritage site. The local story said it was previously devoted to Światowid, a pagan deity. Our analysis excluded the pre-Christian age, as the tree was felled no earlier than the late 15th century, which is in agreement with historical records. The third was a wooden Saint Lawrence Church in Bobrowniki. The presbytery was covered with up to five layers of polychromic paintings, some of high artistic value. We dated three samples from the original wooden board, and by wiggle-matching, the calibrated age interval was narrowed to 1731–1754 cal AD.

This article examines the determination of cultural objects as “national treasures” in the United Kingdom and proposes a heretofore unidentified theoretical space in which such designations are made. Utilizing Foucauldian genealogies of the museum posited by both Tony Bennett and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill as a frame for spaces in which cultural and national identities are curated (which some commentators suggest are outdated, but prove very helpful in the current enterprise), this article develops the argument that designations of items as “national treasures” are made within a specific institutional space – hereinafter termed the “National Treasure Space.” Through the interpretation of the object in this institutional space, it is possible to characterize it as other than the sum of its parts; certain aspects of the object that exist when it is outside of this space are suspended once it is within. As a result, the problematic determination of the object as a national treasure is exacerbated, impacting important relational elements of the object to its owner(s) (both private and public) and the understanding of the object as significant in its representation of the nation.

In July 2021, Liverpool was removed from the prestigious List of World Heritage Sites, sending shockwaves around the global heritage community. More recently, the spotlight has shifted to another world famous site also located in the United Kingdom. During the same 44th Session of the World Heritage Committee, UNESCO threatened to place Stonehenge on the List in Danger if the required changes to a significant billion-pound road enhancement project were not implemented. Given what happened in Liverpool, there are fears that Stonehenge is in danger of moving towards delisting. An interesting critical line of inquiry to emerge from Liverpool, and other World Heritage Sites, concerns the local, national, and international ‘politics at the site’. This article develops this debate by analysing the role of different scalar actors involved in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. More specifically, our article examines how the Stonehenge Alliance sought to engage in, what we define as, scalar manoeuvres that is evidenced by scale jumping and scalar alignments with more powerful players further up the heritage hierarchy in order to effect leverage over the future status of the World Heritage Site.

This article illustrates preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Science for society, society for science at the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice’. It presents the material traces of prisoner-of-war, resettlement and forced labour camps that functioned between 1870 and 1946 in Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice, Poland) and explains their modern social significance.

The purpose of statues in public spaces has recently become a matter of controversy. Using a 1937 quotation from the artist Paul Nash and the surrealist leader André Breton, this paper explores the circumstances in which a statue is read as appropriately – ‘in its right mind’ in their terms – situated in public space. In doing so, it draws primarily on examples from Britain, Europe and North America during the rapid expansion in the number of statues in public space from the eighteenth century onwards. The rightmindedness of a statue is shown as primarily determined not by the subject of the statue itself, or by its reception among the public, but by ways in which public authorities and local elites authorise the use of public space. Yet these authorities’ understanding of the fit between a statue and public space can vary over time. Shifts in the political context often prompt changes to where statues are seen as appropriately located. However, picking up on Nash/Breton's phrase, to place a statue in ‘a state of surrealism’ involves more than mere relocation. This is shown to require additional disruption to a statue's artistic language and/or spatial syntax.