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Cultural Heritage Objects and Their Contexts

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

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Introduction

This entry considers cultural heritage objects and their sociocultural, political, and legal contexts, and examines the implications of those contexts for understanding the past and the present.

Definition

What marks out a cultural object from an ordinary object is its “cultural worth.” Cultural worth is a multifaceted concept, meaning that individual objects can be valued for different reasons by different cultures – on account of their artistic merit, their spiritual or religious significance, their historical importance, or their scientific interest (Lipe 1984). Cultural objects range in type from paintings or other recently produced works of art at one extreme, through to natural objects with no human modification at the other. It is the cultural context that affords value, the broader system of beliefs and practices enfolding the object, not the object itself. A pair of Zuni Ahayu:da (War Gods) in the context of their outdoor shrine speak of one belief system; the...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Neil Brodie

Authors
  1. Neil Brodie
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Correspondence to Neil Brodie .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

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Brodie, N. (2014). Cultural Heritage Objects and Their Contexts. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1210

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1210

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-0426-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-0465-2

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