Cultural resources management - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

This article is concerned with cultural resources in the widest sense: for traditional, archaeological and historic culture specifically see Cultural Heritage Management

Cultural Heritage Management

Cultural heritage management is the vocation and practice of managing cultural heritage. It is a branch of cultural resources management , although it also draws on the practices of conservation, restoration, museology, archaeology, history and architecture...

In the broadest sense, Cultural Resources Management (CRM) is the vocation and practice of managing cultural resources, such as the arts

The arts

The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many creative endeavors and disciplines. It is a broader term than "art", which as a description of a field usually means only the visual arts. The arts encompass visual arts, literary arts and the performing arts – music, theatre, dance and...

and heritage

Cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations...

. It incorporates Cultural Heritage Management which is concerned with traditional and historic culture. It also delves into the material culture of archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

. Cultural resources management encompasses current culture, including progressive and innovative culture, such as urban culture

Urban culture

Urban culture is the culture of towns and cities. In the United States, Urban culture may also sometimes be used as a euphemistic reference to contemporary African American culture.- African American culture :...

, rather than simply preserving and presenting traditional forms of culture.

However, the broad usage of the term is relatively recent and as a result it is most often used as synonymous with heritage management. In the United States, cultural resources management is not usually divorced from the heritage context. The term is, "used mostly by archaeologists and much more occasionally by architectural historians and historical architects, to refer to managing historic places of archaeological, architectural, and historical interests and considering such places in compliance with environmental and historic preservation laws."

Cultural resources include both physical assets such as archaeology, architecture

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

, painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

s and sculpture

Sculpture

Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...

s and also intangible culture such as folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

and interpretative arts, such as storytelling

Storytelling

Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instill moral values...

and drama

Drama

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...

. Cultural resource managers are typically in charge of museum

Museum

A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...

s, galleries, theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

s etc., especially those that emphasize culture specific to the local region or ethnic group. Cultural tourism

Cultural tourism

Cultural tourism is the subset of tourism concerned with a country or region's culture, specifically the lifestyle of the people in those geographical areas, the history of those peoples, their art, architecture, religion, and other elements that helped shape their way of life...

is a significant sector of the tourism industry.

At a national and international level, cultural resource management may be concerned with larger themes, such as language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s in danger of extinction, public education

Public education

State schools, also known in the United States and Canada as public schools,In much of the Commonwealth, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, the terms 'public education', 'public school' and 'independent school' are used for private schools, that is, schools...

, the ethos or operation of multiculturalism

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...

, and promoting access to cultural resources. The Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity

Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity

The Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity was made by the Director-General of UNESCO starting in 2001 to raise awareness on intangible cultural heritage and encourage local communities to protect them and the local people who sustain these forms of cultural...

is an attempt by the United Nations

United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

to identify exemplars of intangible culture.

Background Information

Cultural resource management can trace its beginning to the environment/conservational movement in the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, there was growth in legislation concerning the protection of cultural resources. The Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act of 1974, commonly known as the Moss-Bennett Act, helped to fuel the creation of CRM, while creating “growth in archaeological jobs in the federal government, academia, and private sector.” Federal legislation had passed earlier in 1906 under the Antiquities Act

Antiquities Act

The Antiquities Act of 1906, officially An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities , is an act passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt on June 8, 1906, giving the President of the United States authority to, by executive order, restrict the use of...

, but it was not until the 1970s when the term “cultural resources” was coined by the National Park Services. This term came into more popular usage after two meetings in 1974: the Cultural Resource Management conference and the Airlie House conference. Following these conferences, the National Park Service (NPS) defined cultural resources in the Cultural Resource Management Guidelines as being:

“Those tangible and intangible aspects of cultural systems, both living and dead, that are valued by or representative of a given culture or that contain information about a culture…[They] include but are not limited to sites, structures, districts, objects, and historic documents associated with or representative of peoples, cultures, and human activities and events, either in the present or in the past. Cultural resources also can include primary written and verbal data for interpretation and understanding of those tangible resources.”

Cultural resources management applied to heritage management

Main article Cultural Heritage Management

Cultural Heritage Management

Cultural resources management in the heritage context is mainly concerned with the investigation of sites with archaeological potential, the preservation and interpretation of historic sites and artifacts, and the culture of indigenous people. The subject developed from initiatives in rescue archaeology

Rescue archaeology

Rescue archaeology, sometimes called "preventive" or "salvage" archaeology, is archaeological survey and excavation carried out in areas threatened by, or revealed by, construction or other development...

, sensitivities to the treatment of indigenous people, and subsequent legislation to protect cultural heritage.

In the 1970s, archaeologists created the term "cultural resource management" as a parallel to natural resource management to address the following resources:

Historic properties (as listed or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

)
Older properties that may have cultural value, but may or may not be eligible for the National Register
Historic properties that have cultural value beyond their historicity
Native American graves and cultural items
Shipwrecks
Museum collections
Historical documents
Religious sites
Religious practices
Cultural use of natural resources
Folklife, tradition, and other social institutions
Theater groups, orchestras, and other community cultural amenities

A significant proportion of the archaeological investigation in countries that have heritage management legislation including the USA and UK is conducted on sites under threat of development. In the US, such investigations are now done by private companies on a consulting basis, and a national organization exists to support the practice of CRM. Museum

Museum

s, besides being popular tourist attractions, often play roles in conservation of, and research on, threatened sites, including as repositories for collections from sites slated for destruction.

National Register eligibility

One common task in Cultural Resource Management is to determine whether specific properties are eligible for listing as a National Heritage Site

National Heritage Site

A National Heritage Site is a location/site that regards a building, monument, archeological, geographical,natural or topological feature having a large value that has been registered by a governmental agency of a particular country...

on the National Register of Historic Places. Reasons for listing are often to enhance public awareness or for conservation.

In the US, in order to classify and protect something on the National Register as a cultural resource, there are many laws and regulators to look to:

Authorities for all types of cultural resources:
- The National Environmental Policy Act
  National Environmental Policy Act
  The National Environmental Policy Act is a United States environmental law that established a U.S. national policy promoting the enhancement of the environment and also established the President's Council on Environmental Quality ....
  
  (NEPA)
- Executive Order 12898 (Environmental Justice)

Historic Preservation Authorities:
- The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA)
- Historic Sites Act
  Historic Sites Act
  The Historic Sites Act of 1935 was enacted by the United States Congress largely to organize the myriad federally-own parks, monuments, and historic sites under the National Park Service and the United States Secretary of the Interior...
  
  (HAS)
- Executive Order 13006 (Priority to use of urban historic properties)
- Section 4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act
- The Federal tax code

Archaeological Authorities:
- The Antiquities Act of 1906
- The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA)
- The Archaeological Data Preservation Act of 1974
- The Abandoned Shipwrecks Act
  Abandoned Shipwrecks Act
  The Abandoned Shipwrecks Act is a United States piece of legislation passed into law in 1988 meant to protect historic shipwrecks from treasure hunters and salvagers by transferring the title of the wreck to the state whose waters it lies in.- Background :...
  
  (ASA)

Historical Documents Authorities
- The Federal Records Act

Using the above authorities one then will see whether the property is eligible for the National Register. There are four criteria for determining eligibility. Broadly speaking, the criteria examine whether the property:

is associated with broad patterns of the past (criterion "a"), for example, a farm house that was part of the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves;
is associated with historically important persons (criterion "b"), for example, Monticello being associated with Thomas Jefferson;
is an example of historically important design or artistic merit (criterion "c"), for example, a through truss highway bridge; or
has the potential to yield important information on prehistory or history (criterion "d"), for example, an archaeological site that can yield information about prehistoric Native American life ways.

After these four criteria have been established, one must then look at the integrity of the property. There needs to be, “integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.” In laymen’s terms, it needs to be decided whether the cultural resource is in good enough condition to be protected on the National Register.

When properties are not eligible by themselves, they may be eligible collectively as a historic district

Historic district (United States)

In the United States, a historic district is a group of buildings, properties, or sites that have been designated by one of several entities on different levels as historically or architecturally significant. Buildings, structures, objects and sites within a historic district are normally divided...

. The National Register criteria assume great importance in the US because any location deemed to meet one or more of these criteria is usually treated more carefully than a location that is not deemed to meet any of these locations.

Careers in CRM

Cultural resource management features people from a wide array of disciplines. The general education of most involved in CRM includes, but is not limited to, sociology, archaeology, architectural history, cultural anthropology, and other fields in the social sciences.

In the field of cultural resource management there are many career choices. One could obtain a career with an action agency that works directly with the NEPA or even more specifically, Native American resources. There are also careers that can be found in review agencies like the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is an independent agency of the United States government that promotes the preservation, enhancement, and productive use of the nation's historic resources, and advises the President and Congress on national historic preservation policy.The goal of the...

(ACHP), or the State Historic Preservation Office(SHPO) Beyond these choices, one could also obtain a career as part of the local government and work with planning agencies, housing agencies, social service agencies, local museums, libraries, or educational institutions. Jobs at private cultural resource management companies can range from field technicians (see shovelbum

Shovelbum

Shovelbum is a term used by some archaeologists in the United States to refer to the professional excavators on cultural resource management projects...

) to principal investigators, project archaeologists, historic preservationists, and laboratory work. One could also become a part of an advocacy organization, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation

National Trust for Historic Preservation

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is an American member-supported organization that was founded in 1949 by congressional charter to support preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods through a range of programs and activities, including the publication of Preservation...

Debates

It is commonly debated in cultural resource management how to determine whether cultural or archaeological sites should be considered significant or not. The criteria that is stated by the National Register of Historic Places is said to be able to be, “interpreted in different ways so that the significance… may be subjectively argued for many cultural resources.” Another issue that arises among scholars is that, “protection does not necessarily mean preservation.” Any public projects occurring near the cultural resource can have adverse effects. Development plans for a proposed project may not be able to be changed to limit impact and to avoid damage to the resource.

Management of cultural organizations

The vocation of management in cultural and creative sectors is the subject of research and improvement initiatives, by organizations such as Arts and Business which take a partnership approach to involving professional business people in running and mentoring arts organizations. Some universities now offer vocational degrees.

The management of cultural heritage is underpinned by academic research in archaeology

Archaeology

, ethnography

Ethnography

Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

and history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

. The broader subject is also underpinned by research in sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

and culture studies.

Cultural anthropology

Main article Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...

Understanding the traditional cultures of all peoples (Indigenous or not) is essential in mitigating the adverse impact of development and ensuring that intervention by more developed nations is not prejudicial to the interests of local people or results in the extinction of cultural resources.

Cultural resources policies

Cultural resources policies have developed over time with the recognition of the economic and social importance of heritage and other cultural assets.

The exploitation of cultural resources can be controversial, particularly where the finite cultural heritage resources of developing countries are exported to satisfy the demand for antiquities market in the developed world. The exploitation of the potential intellectual property of traditional remedies in identifying candidates for new drugs has also been controversial. On the other hand, traditional crafts can be important elements of income from tourism, performance of traditional dances, and music that is popular with tourists and traditional designs can be exploited in the fashion industry. Popular culture can also be an important economic asset.

Centre for Cultural Resources and Training
Centre for Cultural Resources and Training
The Centre for Cultural Resources and Training is autonomous organization under Ministry of Culture of Government of India...
Committee on Education, Culture, Tourism and Human Resources
Community art
Community art
Community Art could be loosely defined as a way of creating art in which professional artists collaborate more or less intensively with people who don't normally actively engage in the arts. Community arts, also sometimes known as "dialogical art", "community-engaged" or "community-based art,"...
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
Cultural Heritage Management
Cultural Heritage Management
Cultural heritage management is the vocation and practice of managing cultural heritage. It is a branch of cultural resources management , although it also draws on the practices of conservation, restoration, museology, archaeology, history and architecture...
Cultural landscape
Cultural landscape
Cultural Landscapes have been defined by the World Heritage Committee as distinct geographical areas or properties uniquely "..represent[ing] the combined work of nature and of man.."....
Cultural tourism
Cultural tourism
Cultural tourism is the subset of tourism concerned with a country or region's culture, specifically the lifestyle of the people in those geographical areas, the history of those peoples, their art, architecture, religion, and other elements that helped shape their way of life...
Culture of India
Culture of India
India's languages, religions, dance, music, architecture, food and customs differ from place to place within the country, but nevertheless possess a commonality....
Indian art
Indian art
Indian Art is the visual art produced on the Indian subcontinent from about the 3rd millennium BC to modern times. To viewers schooled in the Western tradition, Indian art may seem overly ornate and sensuous; appreciation of its refinement comes only gradually, as a rule. Voluptuous feeling is...
Intangible culture
Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity
Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity
The Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity was made by the Director-General of UNESCO starting in 2001 to raise awareness on intangible cultural heritage and encourage local communities to protect them and the local people who sustain these forms of cultural...
National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...
Portal:Arts
Public history
Public history
Public history is a term that describes the broad range of activities undertaken by people with some training in the discipline of history who are generally working outside of specialized academic settings. Public history practice has quite deep roots in the areas of historic preservation,...
Rescue archaeology
Rescue archaeology
Rescue archaeology, sometimes called "preventive" or "salvage" archaeology, is archaeological survey and excavation carried out in areas threatened by, or revealed by, construction or other development...
Urban culture
Urban culture
Urban culture is the culture of towns and cities. In the United States, Urban culture may also sometimes be used as a euphemistic reference to contemporary African American culture.- African American culture :...

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Background Information

Cultural resources management applied to heritage management

National Register eligibility

Careers in CRM

Debates

Management of cultural organizations

Cultural anthropology

Cultural resources policies

See also

Further reading

External links