Figure 1: Heritage Futures may be tangible or intangible (credit C Holtorf)

Cornelius Holtorf, Professor of Archaeology and UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University, Sweden

Cornelius Holtorf ‘s most recent paper discusses future-making through cultural heritage, discussing how to overcome “The Climate Heritage Paradox” (World Archaeology 2024). In this interview, he answers some questions about the emergence of heritage futures as a topic of interest and the dynamics of heritage in society.

1. What inspired your interest in the concept of "heritage futures," and how do you see this concept reshaping the field of heritage studies and archaeology?

My interest in the interface between archaeology, heritage and the future was first stimulated by a book I had picked up in 2003 in a second hand bookshop in Stockholm. Gregory Benford’s (1999) Deep time: how humanity communicates across millennia blew my mind. There were chapters, among others, on long-term markers for nuclear waste repositories and on space messages. Benford of course didn’t claim this to be about archaeology and cultural heritage, but I saw the links immediately very clearly ahead of me and lectured to students about it already then.

A few years later I started to collaborate with Anders Högberg who shared my interest in the future. In 2009 and 2011, we put in a couple of applications for research funding for projects on the future agenda of, and future-thinking in the heritage sector, none of which were successful. At the same time, I was courting the Swedish Nuclear Waste and Fuel Management Company (SKB) which had its research facility near Kalmar where I had moved in 2008 and started my first permanent job at the local University College (which later became part of Linnaeus University). At SKB, they were keen to enter collaborations with scientists at our University, and there were regular opportunities to attend seminars and site visits. I attended whenever I could. After two years, in 2011, a research facilitator at my university could open a door. That spring Anders and I went up to Stockholm to meet one of the Company’s directors. She appreciated immediately the significance of the expertise we had as archaeologists in the context of repositories of nuclear waste that needed to provide safety for 100,000 years into the future. It so happened that SKB had just entered an international project on “Preservation of Records, Knowledge & Memory across Generations” at the Nuclear Energy Agency which is part of the OECD in Paris. We have been working with them ever since, focussing specifically on memory and communication across (many) generations.

This work started to become known more widely through our emerging publications, one of the earliest carried the title “Heritage Futures and the Future of Heritage” (Holtorf and Högberg 2013). In 2013, Rodney Harrison began working on an application for a large UCL-based research programme entitled “Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage.” He invited me as a Co-Investigator, together with Sharon Macdonald and Caitlin DeSilvey. The grant was awarded in the following year, and the project ran from 2015 to 2019. In discussions during the first year, we found the original title somewhat clumsy and collectively agreed to rename the project. We settled for “Heritage Futures”, which is how the name came to be used at a larger scale (see Harrison et al 2020).

While we were discussing these issues, I saw a call by the Swedish Research Council inviting candidates to apply for UNESCO Chairs. I went for it and proposed a UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures. My application was eventually approved in 2017 (and renewed in 2021). Since then, I published extensively on heritage and the future, usually co-authored with Anders Högberg who also became affiliated with the Chair (e.g. Holtorf and Högberg 2021).

Will “heritage futures” be reshaping the study of archaeological and other cultural heritage?— it certainly adds a significant new concern to the repertoire of Cultural Heritage Studies. As I understand it, heritage futures is about the roles of heritage in managing the relation between present and futures societies. Heritage futures thus fulfills the common aspiration of caring for heritage for the benefit of future generations by actually posing this as a set of questions: which future generations is the heritage sector providing benefits for? How can we be sure that it will provide such benefits to future generations, given that they will not be living in contexts that closely resemble present generations? Which future uses could other legacies of our age serve? There are also links to many people’s worries about the future and the global challenges that lie ahead: to what extent can cultural heritage address climate change, warfare, pandemics, AI, inequality, and other future challenges?

2. Your work challenges traditional approaches to heritage by emphasizing its dynamic nature in contemporary society. Could you provide some examples of how this approach has influenced your own research or projects?

Looking back at my academic career for the past 30+ years, from student days to UNESCO Chair, I have always been interested in the dynamics of archaeology, prehistory and cultural heritage in contemporary society. Initially, I investigated such issues ethnographically. As an undergraduate student, I was asking local people what they made of a replicated Bronze Age menhir, and in 1992 I published a little booklet about it. Later, that line of research was informing my German and British Masters theses in 1993 resp.1994, and eventually it resulted in two books on archaeology as popular culture (Holtorf 2005) and archaeology in popular culture (Holtorf 2007).

In between, I had conducted my Doctoral research which investigated dynamics in later prehistoric and historic societies, focussing archaeologically on the life-history of Neolithic monuments (Holtorf 2000-2008). As a post-doc, I applied the same interest to my excavation project at Monte da Igreja near Évora in Portugal. I was digging at the site of a megalith to learn about its later uses and re-appropriations. At that time, I also conducted ethnographic research on a large field project at Monte Polizzo in Sicily. By then I was in the middle of critiquing important archaeological notions such as archaeological temporality, the non-renewable past and authenticity, the possibility of time travel (Petersson and Holtorf 2017), conservation and resilience, and not the least archaeological future-making.

3. In your view, what is the role of archaeology and heritage studies in addressing global issues such as climate change, sustainability, and cultural identity?

Figure 2: How can Cultural Heritage Studies and Critical Heritage Studies contribute to building the future we want? (credit: Monika Zeutschel)

Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Studies have important roles in addressing global challenges (Schofield 2024). But in some cases, archaeology and cultural heritage may also be part of the problem and effectively create more harm than benefit. I am very interested in these matters in the context of the post-2030 global agenda that is now on the international drawing board, and where I hope (with many others) that culture and heritage will be playing more significant roles than before.

I wish that the potential of Critical Heritage Studies would be used in that context too. There are too few direct links between the worlds of policy-making and academic theory, each one often in very specific transnational discourses. Everybody would benefit from more exchanges and collaborations across the invisible boundary between them. We should inspire and learn from, rather than critique each other. There are significant policy implications of all theory, and there is insightful theory behind all policy.

Acknowledgment:

The questions were first asked by Mohamed W. Fareed.

Bibliography

Benford, G (1999) Deep Time. How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia. New York: Avon Books.

Harrison, R., DeSilvey, C., Holtorf, C., Macdonald, S., Bartolini, N., Breithoff, E., Fredheim, H., Lyons, A., May, S., Morgan, J., & Penrose, S. (eds) (2020). Heritage Futures. Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. London: UCL Press.

Holtorf, C. (2000-2008) Monumental Past: The Life-histories of Megalithic Monuments in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany). Electronic monograph. University of Toronto: Centre for Instructional Technology Development.

Holtorf, C. (2005) From Stonehenge to Las Vegas. Archaeology as Popular Culture. Lanham: Altamira Press.

Holtorf, C. (2007) Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture. Illustrated by Quentin Drew. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Holtorf, C. and A. Högberg (2013) Heritage Futures and the Future of Heritage. In S. Bergerbrant and S. Sabatini (eds), Counterpoint: Essays in Archaeology and Heritage Studies in Honour of Professor Kristian Kristiansen, pp. 739-746. BAR Int. Ser. 2508. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Holtorf, C. and A. Högberg, eds. (2021) Cultural Heritage and the Future. London and New York: Routledge.

Petersson, B. and C. Holtorf, eds. (2017) The Archaeology of Time Travel. Experiencing the Past in the 21st Century. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Schofield, John (2024) Wicked Problems for Archaeologists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cornelius Holtorf is Professor of Archaeology and holds a UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. His current research interests include heritage futures and heritage theory. Among his recent publications is “The Climate Heritage Paradox – how rethinking archaeological heritage can address global challenges of climate change” in World Archaeology (2024). Holtorf has been a member of the ACHS since its establishment and he attended annual meetings in Göteborg, Montreal, Hangzhou, London (virtually), and Santiago de Chile.