Wherein Lies the Heritage Value? Rethinking the Heritage Value of Cultural Landscapes from an Aboriginal Perspective

117 As Head points out, “the cultural heritage sector uses the classical geographical sense of landscapes as modified by human activity, with an emphasis on ancient monuments and historical buildings.” In other words, cultural landscape heritage is generally approached in terms of material or morphological artifacts that constitute culturally determined physical, and therefore visible, modifications to the natural landscape. For example, in the UNESCO World Heritage context, the set of cultural landscapes inscribed onto the World Heritage List reflects a clear preference for cultural landscapes characterized primarily by a unique material or morphological cultural imprint on the natural landscape. This observation is congruent with a recent report on World Heritage activities that highlights the current materialist approach to cultural landscape heritage as a significant limiting factor when it comes to identifying, assessing, and designating cultural properties that could contribute to redressing existing gaps and imbalances on the World Heritage List. Horton notes a similar materialist tendency when she highlights the “uneasy fit” between cultural landscapes and the (U.S.) National Register. Horton argues that the National Register’s approach to cultural landscapes is dominated by an “artifactual typology,” which locates heritage value in discrete physical entities rather than the landscape as a whole. She further argues that this “artifactual typology” has led to a bias against acknowledging cultural landWherein Lies the Heritage Value? Rethinking the Heritage Value of Cultural Landscapes from an Aboriginal Perspective