Cultural landscapes as World Heritage

The paper traces the development of the concept of 'cultural landscapes' within the framework of the 1972 Unesco World Heritage Convention. It describes the initial concern of the World Heritage Committee, which arose from the inscription of so-called 'mixed sites', and the subsequent faltering progress towards the definition of cultural landscapes and the adoption of new criteria for their evaluation in 1992. The Unesco World Heritage Convention of 1972 was conceived in order to establish 'an effective system of collective protection of the cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value' [1].The distinction between cultural and natural properties is set out unambiguously in the definitions (Articles 1 and 2). Article 1 identifies three categories of cultural property: 'monuments', 'group of buildings' and 'sites'. Only the third of these is relevant to cultural landscapes: 'works of man or the combined works of nature and of man, and areas including archaeological sites which are of outstanding value from the historical, aesthetic, ethnological, or anthropological points of view'. The phrase 'the combined works of nature and of man' is an implicit recognition from the outset of the eligibility for inclusion on the World Heritage List of nonmonumental cultural property, i.e. cultural landscapes. A perceptive review of the first 20 years of the Convention has been published by a distinguished scholar who has been associated with it from the start [2]. Following the first inscriptions in 1978, the first 'mixed site' (i.e. a property that was inscribed on the basis of both cultural and natural criteria) was added to the List in 1979 Tikal in Guatemala, which is an area of tropical rainforest that includes one of the greatest Mayan city sites. By 1992 14 more mixed sites had been inscribed on the List: in Algeria (Tassili n'Ajjer), Australia (Kakadu National Park; Willandra Lakes; Tasmanian Wilderness), Chin(\ (Mount Taishan; Mount Huangshan), Greece (Mo!lnt Athos; Meteora), Macedonia (the Ohrid region), Mali (Bandiagara), Peru (Machu Picchu; Rio Abiseo National Park) and Turkey (Goreme and the rock sites of Cappadocia; HierapolisPamukkale). They include prehistoric rock-art sites, sacred mountains and exceptional geological features with important religious or secular settlements on them.