The diplomacy of extra-territorial heritage: the Kokoda Track,Papua New Guinea

The global interest in the memory of war in recent decades has brought challenges in managing and conserving extra-territorial war heritage: that is, sites of memory that have a greater significance for people outside the sovereign territory in which the sites physically reside. This article considers this issue in relation to the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea, a site of central importance in the Australian national memory of war. The successful conservation of the Track throws new light on the practice of heritage diplomacy. Working mostly outside the more commonly explored arena of global heritage governance, the Australian and New Guinean governments employed bilateral diplomacy to manage domestic stakeholder expectations, and thereby identified a convergence of interests and mutual gain by linking heritage protection with local development needs. They have also encouraged the construction of a narrative of the events of World War II that in some respects might be described as shared. Thus, heritage diplomacy is underpinned by a transnational consensus about the heritage’s significance, at least at the government level, which arguably divests the Kokoda Track of its exclusively ‘extra-territorial’ quality.     

In Situ Preservation of Wetland Heritage: Hydrological and Chemical Change in the Burial Environment of the Somerset Levels,UK

Abstract

In situ preservation is a core strategy for the conservation and management of waterlogged remains at wetland sites. Inorganic and organic remains can, however, quickly become degraded, or lost entirely, as a result of chemical or hydrological changes. Monitoring is therefore crucial in identifying baseline data for a site, the extent of spatial and or temporal variability, and in evaluating the potential impacts of these variables on current and future in situ preservation potential.

Since August 2009, monthly monitoring has taken place at the internationally important Iron Age site of Glastonbury Lake Village in the Somerset Levels, UK. A spatial, stratigraphic, and analytical approach to the analysis of sediment horizons and monitoring of groundwater chemistry, redox potential, water table depth and soil moisture (using TDR) was used to characterize the site.

Significant spatial and temporal variability has been identified, with results from water-table monitoring and some initial chemical analysis from Glastonbury presented here. It appears that during dry periods parts of this site are at risk from desiccation. Analysis of the chemical data, in addition to integrating the results from the other parameters, is ongoing, with the aim of clarifying the risk to the entire site.