02.06.2026.

Transgenerational Heritage in the Digital Age: From Preservation to Regeneration through Interactive Platforms

 

Elisha Clever

Innovation for Regenerative African Generational Excellence (IRAGE), Platform for Digital Regeneration of Intangible Heritage, Kigali, Rwanda

 

This contribution explores how African heritage systems—rooted in transgenerational oral traditions, landscapes, and social memory—can inform new approaches to digital heritage. It advances the concept of digital regeneration of intangible heritage, positioning platforms such as IRAGE (Innovation for Regenerative African Generational Excellence) as interactive ecosystems that move beyond preservation toward active participation and co-creation.

By bridging archaeology, cultural memory, and digital innovation, the paper proposes a regenerative model in which heritage is continuously renewed through community engagement and technological interaction.

 

07.07.2026.

New archaeological research at Damrah-jo-daro, Sindh, Pakistan: Challenges in the excavation and preservation of a massive stupa complex

 

 

Ali Lashari

Syed Faraz Ali

Danish Ahmed

Directorate General of Antiquities & Archaeology, Govt. of Sindh, Karachi, Pakistan

Maher Ali Sher

Directorate Exploration and Excavation Branch, CTA&AD, Govt. of Sindh, Karachi, Pakistan

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The site of Damrah-jo-daro situated near Mohenjo-daro in Larkana District, Sindh, has long been known to archaeologist’s as a series of eroding mounds that include one or more stupas with some lower mounds that may represent a monastery or habitation areas. In summer of 2025 systematic surveys and aerial drone documentation of these mounds which cover an area of around 62 hectares have been performed. Excavations on Mound A, revealed substantial baked-brick architectural remains of a massive stupa. Pottery finds, figurines, brick shapes and sizes indicate that this structure was constructed and maintained for a considerable period of time, most probably beginning as early as the Mauryan Period (3rd century BCE) and continuing through the Kushana Period (3rd century CE). Stratigraphic analysis of the remains indicates multiple construction phases, including periods of erosion and reconstruction, indicating deliberate engineering adaptations to the eroding stupa structure over time. Fragments of diagnostic stone carvings and a fragmentary figure of the Buddha shall help explore the links between this site and other stupa complexes excavated in Sindh and adjoining regions of South Asia. Surface collections and associated material culture, including ceramics and architectural debris, further support the interpretation of the site as an active monastic or ritual center connected to regional trade and pilgrimage networks. These findings highlight the importance of Dhamrah-jo-daro in understanding the southern spread of Buddhism in Sindh, particularly along Indus deltaic and coastal routes, challenging the traditional geographic focus on northern regions. The site demonstrates continuity of sacred landscapes, where Buddhist architecture was superimposed upon earlier habitation mounds, reflecting long-term cultural adaptation.

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15.09.2026.

Reframing Authenticity: Integrating Social Memory and Emotional Resonance in Built Heritage Assessment

 

Ayesha Agha Shah

Coordinator, Landscape Architecture Program, Department of Architecture & Interior Design, College of Engineering, University of Bahrain; ISC Member, ICOMOS TheoPhilos, Chair, DOCOMOMO Bahrain

 

The concept of authenticity in heritage conservation has evolved from a primarily material-based understanding toward a more pluralistic and context-sensitive framework, as emphasized in international charters such as the Nara Document on Authenticity. While these frameworks acknowledge the importance of intangible dimensions such as cultural meaning, memory, and social value, there remains a lack of practical methods to systematically assess these aspects.

This presentation introduces the Place Authenticity Matrix, a semi-quantitative framework developed through doctoral research, which integrates both tangible and intangible dimensions of authenticity. Building upon the conceptual foundations of the Nara Grid, as discussed by Prof. Koen Van Balen, the matrix expands existing approaches by incorporating experiential indicators such as emotional resonance, social memory, and sense of place. These dimensions are explored through user-based data, including perception studies, interviews, and field observations.

Drawing on case studies of adaptively reused heritage buildings in Karachi, Pakistan, the presentation highlights how intangible dimensions particularly memory and emotional attachment contribute to sustaining authenticity, even in contexts where the material fabric has undergone transformation.

By translating intangible cultural values into structured assessment criteria, this presentation engages with ongoing discussions in the field of intangible cultural heritage, particularly those aligned with the objectives of ICOMOS ICICH. It aims to stimulate interdisciplinary dialogue on how experiential and memory-based dimensions can be more effectively integrated into heritage evaluation practices.

 

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27.10.2026.

Tradition and Transformation: Omani Heritage Settlements and Cultural Landscapes

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Nasreen Kauser Dummi Shabbir

Architecture and Interior Design, College of Engineering and Architecture, University of Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman

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Oman's historic settlements, called *Haraths*, embody centuries of cultural heritage, vernacular architecture and panoramic stewardship. These living environments recreate the interaction between tangible structures – forts, mosques, irrigation systems, and intangible traditions together with oral narratives, place names and common practices. Nevertheless, rapid urbanisation, climate pressure and fragmented governance increasingly threaten their continuity. This study aims to observe the dual strategies of lifestyle and transformation in Omani settlements with background, situating Haraths as dynamic cultural landscapes rather than static relics. The objectives are threefold: (1) to research the architectural and ecological functions that outline the Haraths; (2) to explore how oral traditions and social reminiscence support identification and resilience; and (3) to consider adaptive strategies such as stability preservation with pioneering desires. Methodologically, archival research, disciplinary research and participatory mapping are integrated with neighborhood communities. Comparative analysis of case research including Nizwa Fort and surrounding Haraths illustrates how construction integrated technologies, water control structures and panoramic practices can be harmonized with heritage values. Preliminary consequences highlight the capacity for phased revitalization: urgent stabilization of structures, catalytic landscape projects, and network-driven organizations that generate financial returns while safeguarding authenticity. Findings also oversee that intangible history narratives, rituals, and place names underpin collective stewardship, ensuring that preservation is not always merely technical, however socially embedded.

The studies address a critical gap: although international history discourse regularly privileges enormous structures, the Omani Haraths demonstrate the need to integrate landscape, oral traditions and community governance into conservation frameworks. By foregrounding this holistic approach, the observation contributes to international debates on sustainable historical past control, and provides transferable learning to regions facing comparable challenges of modernization and cultural continuity.

Ultimately, the session emphasizes Haraths as laboratories of resilience where tradition informs transformation, and historical landscapes grow to become energetic negotiators in shaping sustainable futures.

 

24.11.2026.

Protecting authenticity is not about preserving the past, but rather a commitment to sincerity

 

Mostafa Pour Ali

Advisor to the Vice-Minister and Deputy of Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts, Ian; Assistant Professor of Architecture and Restoration at Islamic Azad University of Iran, Center for Historic Fabric Studies (CHIFAS)

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One of the key issues in contemporary discussions of cultural heritage is the essence of authenticity. In the context of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, the concept of authenticity holds a different place compared to tangible heritage. Unlike the strict definition of authenticity in the 1972 Convention, the 2003 Convention allows for changes in the form of intangible heritage to ensure they align with the times and respect human rights principles. For example, while a genocide memorial in Cambodia must preserve its physical features from the past in order to be registered as an UNESCO World Heritage site, a centuries-old tradition concerning women can only be recognized as intangible heritage if it no longer contradicts contemporary human rights, particularly women's rights.

In such cases, elements of the tradition that conflict with current human values must be altered. Both approaches are valid within their respective frameworks and goals, but they raise a critical question: How should we approach the concept of historical authenticity in today’s world? This presentation seeks to offer a comparative reassessment of authenticity and sincerity, aiming to strike a balance between the integrity of tangible and intangible heritage. It is crucial to understand that protecting authenticity is not about adhering to past forms or nostalgia, but about maintaining cultural sincerity in its expression. To achieve this, we must view authenticity from a broader perspective: authenticity as sincerity. In the new doctrinal framework, even when intangible heritage is modified to align with contemporary human rights values, these changes must be made with sincerity and acknowledged as such. It should be considered that the concept of sincerity should be more explicitly addressed in texts and guidelines related to the protection of tangible heritage, as a concept overlapping with notions such as genuineness, honesty, and naturalness (the absence of artificiality).

 

01.12.2026.

Landscapes of Memory: Oral Traditions and Cultural Meanings among the Bakonzopeople of the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda

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Kameli Zephaniia Bwambale

Association of World Heritage Ambassadors Uganda (AWOHA-Uganda)

 

This paper explores the intricate relationship between landscape, oral traditions, and social memory among the Bakonzo people of the Rwenzori Mountains in western Uganda. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, folklore studies, and cultural geography, the study examines how the Bakonzo embed meaning, identity, and historical consciousness within their mountainous environment. The Rwenzori landscape often referred to as the “Mountains of the Moon” derives its name from the snows and is not merely a physical setting but lived and symbolic space shaped by generations of storytelling, ritual practices, and place-based knowledge. The paper focuses on oral narratives, including myths of origin, clan histories, and spiritual beliefs associated with specific peaks, rivers, and valleys. These narratives function as repositories of collective memory, encoding ecological knowledge, moral values, and social structures. Place names, in particular, are analyzed as linguistic markers that reveal layers of historical experience and cultural interpretation, linking tangible geographic features to intangible heritage. By examining the dynamic interaction between people and landscape, the study highlights how the Bakonzo conceptualize their environment as sacred and socially constructed. It also considers how these traditions are transmitted across generations and how they adapt in the face of contemporary pressures such as modernization, climate change, and shifting land-use practices. The research draws on qualitative methods, including oral history interviews and participatory observation, to foreground indigenous voices and perspectives. The paper argues that Bakonzo oral traditions provide critical insights into the interpretation of cultural landscapes, demonstrating the inseparability of natural and cultural heritage. It advocates for the integration of indigenous knowledge systems into heritage conservation frameworks, emphasizing the need to safeguard both the physical environment of the Rwenzori Mountains and the intangible cultural expressions that give it meaning.

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19.01.2027.

The Ocean is Not Empty: Social Memory and the Invisible Cultural Landscapes of the Pacific

 

Elena Perez-Alvaro

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow, University of Auckland

ICUCH ICOMOS Expert Member, Blue Shield International Underwater Conflict Heritage Group Chair

 

The ocean is often imagined as distance, a surface to be crossed or controlled. This paper starts elsewhere, from the idea that the sea is already known, inhabited, and remembered. Across the Pacific, navigation has long relied on ways of knowing that do not depend on instruments or fixed coordinates. Currents, winds, stars, and the movement of waves are read through practice, memory, and attention. These are not abstract systems but lived forms of knowledge, carried in bodies, stories, and everyday experience. The ocean, in this sense, is not a void between islands, but a space structured through relationships.

Much of this knowledge has been sustained and transmitted through roles that are often overlooked. Women, in particular, have held and continue to shape maritime knowledge in ways that are less visible in dominant narratives. Through storytelling, teaching, observing environmental change, and maintaining connections between land and sea, they contribute to forms of navigation and orientation that extend beyond the act of voyaging itself. Their perspectives complicate the image of navigation as a purely male or heroic endeavour, and instead situate it within broader systems of care, continuity, and social memory. The paper considers how these practices create cultural landscapes that are not easily mapped. Place names, stories, and routes exist in motion, tied to experience rather than fixed location. What appears as empty on a chart is, in practice, dense with meaning.

This paper invites a shift in how oceanic landscapes are understood. Rather than treating the sea as absence, it proposes recognising it as a space where memory circulates, where knowledge is continually renewed, and where relationships between people and environment are actively sustained.

 

Bio

Dr Elena Perez-Alvaro is a researcher and lecturer specialising in underwater cultural heritage and maritime landscapes, with a focus on how knowledge, memory, and practice shape relationships between people and the ocean. Her work explores the intersections between heritage, ocean geopolitics, and contemporary global challenges, particularly in Pacific contexts. She holds a PhD in Underwater Cultural Heritage and a Master’s degree in International and Maritime Law. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow based at the University of Auckland, and has carried out research across the Pacific, including Guam and other island settings. Elena is an expert member of ICOMOS ICUCH and Chair of the Blue Shield International Underwater Conflict Heritage Working Group. She is also the founder of the Women & Oceans Think Tank, where she focuses on women’s knowledge, navigation traditions, and lived maritime practices as key elements in understanding oceanic cultural landscapes.

 

 

02.02.2027.

“The blue glass bead game”: the aesthetics and functionality of glass technology in Mycenaean Greece

 

Kalliopi Nikita

Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica, Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Greece

 

Mycenaean blue and turquoise glass beads in simple, relief or composite forms harmoniously combine a highly-sophisticated material technology, glass, with a decorative minor art, jewelry. Abundance, diversity and standardization of Mycenaean glass beads illustrate a thriving glass industry operating during the palatial times, namely Late Helladic III A-B (14th-13th centuries BC). After the collapse of the palaces in Late Helladic IIIC (12th-11th centuries BC), glass decreased in quality and quantity with some evidence for the continuity of previous palatial tradition.

Three case studies on blue glass beads from selected sites will facilitate a comprehensive discussion on the aesthetics and functionality of glass technology in Mycenaean Greece.  Firstly, glass assemblages from cemetery sites in Late Helladic I-II and Late Helladic IIIA-B Argolid and Attica will cast light on the diversity of forms and designs in association with manufacturing techniques. Secondly, scientific analyses of blue glass beads from Late Helladic IIIA-B cemeteries in Phthiotis will provide a means of defining their plant-ash composition as this is set within the technological tradition of glass production in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean. Finally, morphology of glass beads from the Late Helladic IIIC cemetery of Perati, Attica along with glass beads of mixed-alkali composition from the contemporaneous cemetery of Elateia-Alonaki, Phthiotis will help us trace continuities and discontinuities in the use of blue glass in post-palatial Mycenaean Greece.

The prospective use of glass beads is directly interrelated to the specific visual properties of glass, which is defined by aesthetic features and functionality as well as by human choice and mediation. The paper aims to elucidate the role of glass beads as burial offering intended for the ritual of dressing and ornamentation of the dead in conjunction with the distinctive predilection for the use of cobalt and turquoise blue glass by the Mycenaeans.

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02.03.2027.

Pigments, provenance, and toponymy in the Classical world

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Sujitha Pillai

Independent Researcher

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In the Classical world, pigments functioned as both material substances and indicators of geographically specific geological knowledge. This paper investigates the relationship between pigment provenance, geological sourcing, and toponymy, arguing that colour materials were embedded within systems of extraction, exchange, and social memory that linked landscape to language. By combining archaeometric provenance studies, ancient textual evidence, and folkloric traditions, the study reconstructs how pigments were identified, named, and culturally remembered across the Mediterranean.

A central focus is the way pigment names preserved references to geological origins while simultaneously becoming anchors for narrative and oral tradition. Certain materials were explicitly associated with defined production zones, acting as markers of place identity and, in some cases, divine or ritual significance. A key example is Sinopean Red (Σινωπικὴ μίλτος), associated with Sinope, whose prominence reflects both its geological quality and the integration of peripheral resource regions into wider Mediterranean exchange networks. These extraction zones formed “humanised landscapes,” where material production intersected with mythic and historical interpretation.

Similarly, so-called “sacred earths” such as Melian White from Milos or Lemnian Earth from Lemnos demonstrate how extraction practices were embedded in ritual frameworks and local legends, transforming mining and quarrying sites into enduring loci of intangible cultural heritage.

The study examines how these locations were encoded in ancient literary and toponymic systems. References in Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius are used alongside linguistic evidence to reconstruct the cultural “biography” of pigments used in the Classical world.

By integrating provenance studies with social memory and folklore, this paper argues that the cultural value of pigments in the Classical world derived not only from their chemical properties but also from the narratives, places, and landscapes through which they were known and transmitted.

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13.04.2027.

Raccontare il territorio: il patrimonio archeologico della provincia di Lecco / Talking about the Territory: The Archaeological Heritage of the Provincia di Lecco

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Alessandra Magni

Rock Art, Landscape and the Prevalence of Collective Memory, Gruppo di Formazione Scuola Lavoro - training group - Liceo “Manzoni”, Lecco (Lombardia, Italia) with Associazione Anemos – Milano

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We would like to share with ArchaeoLore a training program involving schools, institutions, and associations in Lombardy.

During the 2025-2026 school year, a group of 21 seventeen years old students travelled through the province of Lecco (Lombardy, Italy), visiting museums and archaeological sites, both open to the public and those with restricted access, and meeting people involved in the protection and enhancement of these sites. Ideally, they travelled the ancient road that runs along the eastern shore of Lake Como; they encountered traces of the presence of the Celts and Goths, they retraced ancient water cults and memories of saints, and they observed the lake from the tops of medieval towers.

The students thus had the opportunity to compare their knowledge and personal experiences of the places (through individual explorations and family or folk tales) with the results of scientific research. Their goal is to become competent communicators of the tangible and intangible heritage of the region they studied and in which they live.

The program will conclude in the summer with an editorial product for internal use that will recount the experience that we would illustrate to you.

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