Contemporary Heritage and the Future

Abstract

Studies of the future are pertinent in order to make the best decisions in present society. They are, however, full of difficulties, as the future is an empirical field which does not exist (Slaughter, 1996; Bell, 1997; Mogensen, 2006). Both pertinence and difficulties apply also to studying the future in relation to human culture. The main challenge lies in the circumstance that cultural heritage of the future cannot in itself be empirically investigated and described, since it is in part dependent on decisions that have not yet been made. Studying heritage futures is thus about considering what we know about cultural heritage in the context of prognoses and visions of what will come. Yet how do we do that? The American anthropologist Samuel Gerald Collins contributed to an interesting discussion on how anthropology and anthropologists have previously embraced the future and how they might now be embracing it. He emphasized that an important approach is to vouchsafe the possibility that future ways in which people will think and act may be very different from today, and, in doing so, to open up a space (or a spacetime) for critical reflection on the present (Collins, 2008, p. 8). This approach is a useful programmatic declaration for engaging with the future in disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, history and heritage studies.

We need to define in advance a response to the great issues of the next two decades, to define a future just as we have always presumed to create the past. Archaeology is about change and time; future time differs only from past time in its pace, and as a profession we should be able to adjust to the future, and direct it, more than most.

Graham Fairclough, abstract written for the session ‘Archaeology Tomorrow’, which he organized at the 1992 Institute of Field Archaeology’s Archaeology in Britain conference