Intangible Heritage in Conservation Management Planning: The Case of Robben Island1

Robben Island Museum officially commemorates ‘the triumph of the human spirit over adversity’, relating especially to the period of political imprisonment between 1961 and 1991 when Robben Island was most notorious as a political prison for the leaders of the anti‐apartheid struggle. Robben Island became a World Heritage Site in December 1999 because of its universal symbolic significance—its intangible heritage. This paper explores the implications for conservation management planning of interpreting and managing the intangible heritage associated with such sites. Examples will be drawn from the conservation planning exercise undertaken by the Robben Island Museum between 2000 and 2002. The paper will look specifically at how Robben Island's symbolic significance has been defined and how competing interpretations should be included in the management plan. It then discusses the challenges around managing historic fabric whose significance is defined as primarily symbolic, and ways of safeguarding the intangible heritage associated with it.     

Children's projected political preference: transcending local politics

Traditionally, research on political preference has primarily focused on adults within their local political context. This research attempts to show that the perceived political preference of children is part of their national identity, and encompasses not only local politics but also the global and regional discourse. The present study surveyed 1187 Palestinian adolescents attending school, grades 5–7, in the West Bank to examine whether children's future political party preference is grounded in local/global discourse. The findings revealed a discrepancy between participants' perceptions of the local dominant political party and their projected political party preferences. This research argues that political party preference is facilitated through the transcendence of national identity embedded in children's geopolitical agency. The significance of the findings emphasizes that territorial boundaries are artificial; therefore, children's geopolitical agency is impacted by extraterritorial discourse and is able to transcend the local and regional context into a global politics.     

Bone Modifications Resulting from Captive Chimpanzee Mastication: Implications for the Interpretation of Pliocene Archaeological Faunas

In order to obtain chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) mastication damage on bones, cleaned, disarticulated ribs and long bones of bovids and cervids were coated with food substances found palatable by captive chimpanzees. The bones were then presented to four groups of mixed sex and mixed age chimpanzees from the Tulsa Zoo (Oklahoma) and the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (San Antonio, Texas). In the process of feeding on the coated bones, the chimpanzees inflicted discernible mastication damage on 73·61% of the total recovered bone specimens. Analysis of these chimpanzee-induced bone modifications reveals that non-technological hominoids of the same approximate size and with comparable dentition and bite force to the gracile australopithecines and earliestHomoare very capable of inflicting the same range and degree of damage to bones as are feeding carnivores. This finding implies that zooarchaeologists must take a contextual (configurational) approach when analysing mastication damage on arch-aeological bones, rather than automatically attributing all such damage to carnivores.