Archaeological conservation has been a hegemonic discipline focused primarily on conserving an inflexible interpretation of objects, cryonizing their narratives, erasing or hiding their multi-temporalities while disconnecting them from their communities. Archaeological collections are spaces of dispute but also of inclusion and historical repair. However, the agency and curative role of conservation have rarely been examined through the lens of materiality and have often remained constrained by an exclusive emphasis on physicality. We argue that an archaeological object whose multivocal documentation is lost cannot support the writing of future memories and therefore remains incomplete and untreated. Thus, we propose a journey towards a relational conservation from “the otherness,” including methods to recover objects’ biographies, their materialities, multitemporalities and multivocality. An interdisciplinary conservation where ethnographic techniques, in combination with traditional approaches, become agents of diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. A critical conservation to combat the monolithic discourses embedded in collections.

This presentation examines archaeologically-uncovered Islamic coins minted during the Abbasid Caliphate and their post-excavation histories in museums and among local communities. I move beyond numismatic questions of chronology and economic value towards the study of Islamic coinage as cultural heritage that connects local communities with their pasts, presents, and futures. I question: what are the social values that museums communicate to the public regarding Islamic coins and to what extent do those museum narratives align with local communities’ claimed heritage of those archaeological assemblages? I compare key case studies of Islamic coin displays in museums in North America, Europe, and the Middle East to the heritage claims of stakeholders culturally affiliated with the Middle East and North Africa. This presentation contributes improved understandings of the diversity of heritage globally by examining how the archaeology of small, seemingly ubiquitous materials like coins can no longer be held separate from heritage claims.

This paper examines nineteenth‑century wallpaper in Aotearoa New Zealand as material culture and relational heritage, connecting people, place, and identity within settler domestic interiors. Focusing on domestic interiors as sites of identity and encounter, it explores how wallpaper may have reflected identity and could have mediated relationships between European settlers and Māori through meanings of belonging, power, adaptation, and material exchange. The paper’s objectives are to foreground wallpaper as a connective heritage object; to critically examine the meanings, functions, and cross‑cultural role of wallpaper within colonial homes; and to demonstrate the relevance of historic interiors and the decorative arts within these to contemporary heritage practice and interpretation.

This paper proposes to approach the adaptive reuse of vernacular built heritage as a practice of connection and repair, understood beyond the mere technical gesture of material restoration. In line with critical approaches to heritage, which conceive of it not as a fixed object but as a set of constantly changing relationships, we consider repair as a socio-cultural, sensory, and ethical process of reconfiguring the links between humans, places, materials, and savoir-faire. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Quebec on intangible heritage and the craftsmen associated with the construction and maintenance of vernacular wooden houses, we explore how repair gestures reactivate the dormant potential of buildings. By mobilizing often marginalized artisanal knowledge, these practices and artisans contribute to the formation of intergenerational communities of practice, reconnect inhabitants to fragile territories and allow them to project themselves into the future using the tools and knowledge of the past.