Western heritage management often frames landscapes as static entities that can be irreparably fractured, destroyed, or lost. However, landscapes assert their agency in response to material and ‘destructive’ interactions with them regardless. This presentation considers the embodied relationships that archaeological heritage managers in Norway develop with landscapes and with time during the management process.
Due to dramatic land uplift, Stone Age coastal landscapes in Southeastern Norway, now rich with dense forests far from the current Oslo Fjord shoreline, exemplify how humans have nurtured co-creative relationships with landscapes for millennia. Landscape transformations now manifest as infrastructure and housing development projects intersecting with protected heritage sites. These sites, the landscape, and the past continue to co-construct regional identity, settlement, and use patterns with local inhabitants.
By acknowledging shared and borrowed themes from Indigenous ontologies, this presentation invites discussion on how to weave together heritage theory and management practices in relationship with landscapes.

Preserving architectural heritage in insular territories presents distinctive challenges compared to continental contexts, including isolation, environmental fragility, and scarce built vestiges. Documentation thus becomes vital for cultural resilience. This study examines Navarino Island, long inhabited by the Yagan people and conditioned by the uneven attention of the State of Chile, where material traces of settlement remain fragmentary. Focusing on Plan Navarino (1967), coordinated by the National Department of State Borders and Boundaries (DIFROL) to strengthen sovereignty on the southern border, the research identifies Puerto Toro—on Navarino’s eastern coast—as its sole surviving material evidence. Using DIFROL’s documentary corpus complemented by local press, fieldwork, and interviews, the study reconstructs an underexplored process in national history. Findings show that combining dispersed records and oral testimonies reveals overlooked heritage, making documentation critical for safeguarding identity in peripheral contexts while aligning with conservation strategies of community participation, digitisation, and recognition of tangible and intangible heritage.

This paper brings the ontological politics of heritage into dialogue with border theory to examine how heritage and borders recast one another in the Turkish–Georgian borderscape. Drawing on spatial and ethnographic research, it argues that conservation practices actively reproduce bordering regimes that shape cultural landscapes, rural settlements, and monumental architecture. Rather than approaching heritage as a fixed asset within national territory, the study conceptualizes heritage-making as a relational practice that assembles presents and designs futures. While official conservation tools often reinforce territorial logics, everyday engagements, cross-border memories, religious affiliations, and ecological interdependencies destabilize these bounded frameworks. These overlapping ontologies show heritage as diplomatic instrument, sacred landscape, livelihood, habitat, and transnational memory at once. The paper proposes a shift toward relational, connectivity-based conservation and reframes the borderscape as a generative space where past, present, and future are woven together.

This individual paper examines Bund boathouses as a missing riverfront architectural typology in Shanghai’s contemporary heritage narrative. Boathouses were widely visible along the Huangpu River edge from the treaty-port era through the early PRC, appearing in images and film, and supporting mooring, storage, repair, river-land movement, and shelter for waterside labourers. Yet they are rarely named in current heritage interpretation and conservation framework. Using policy documents, historical media, literary works, and fieldwork, this paper traces how boathouses are recorded, classified, and made visible or invisible over time. Boathouses are treated as informal facilities, not heritage buildings; their labour memories read as poverty and mobility. As the Bund is curated for a modern city image, these river-edge structures are removed from space and narratives today. It shows how the Bund’s past is connected to the present through the interaction of tangible form, intangible working-life memory, and heritage selection mechanisms.