The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past

Heritage sites are one of the most visible, accessible and tangible manifestations of heritage and are also some of the essential building blocks of heritage. Yet we are still without a sense of how they operate over time and in relation to each other. This paper will introduce the notion of the ‘heritagescape’ as a means of interpreting and analysing heritage sites as unique social spaces that offer an experience of the past. In contrast to previous attempts to investigate these places, the heritagescape offers the means to focus both on the underlying similarities and also on the relationships of different sites to each other. As such, heritagescape offers a coherent and overarching methodology by which to identify the universal processes and elements that characterise heritage sites and will allow us to take our examination of heritage as a cultural phenomenon into the future.