This paper reflects on the early stages of a six-month multispecies ethnography of water practices in the Wellington region of Aotearoa New Zealand. Approximately three months into fieldwork, it examines how knowledge emerges when different epistemic worlds meet in practice—among iwi, ecologists, policy actors, and the river itself. Rather than comparing knowledge systems, the study focuses on epistemic encounters: situations in which different ways of knowing come into relation and reshape what becomes knowable. From this perspective, heritage is approached not as a fixed object of the past, but as a relational process emerging through ongoing interactions between people, water, land, and more-than-human presences. The paper introduces this conceptual framing alongside early field experiences, contributing to the conference theme of Tūhono – relationality and to discussions on relational, environmentally engaged, and decolonising approaches to heritage.

This paper explores how coastal heritage operates as relational waterscapes, through which relationships between people, water, and infrastructure are negotiated in the context of climate adaptation. Using the island of Marken, the Netherlands, as a case study, it explores how heritage mediates relations between past flood experiences, contemporary governance practices, and anticipated climate futures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper analyses how dikes and surrounding waterscapes function as relational heritage infrastructures, through which embodied and intergenerational understandings of risk, safety, and belonging are shaped. While technocratic risk assessments remain dominant in Dutch climate adaptation planning, local perceptions of safety emerge from long-standing lived relations with water and landscape. By foregrounding the significance of heritage as an active connector between people and their environments, this paper contributes to ACHS discussions on relationality by illustrating how relational heritage spaces are vital in shaping climate imaginaries, contesting adaptation strategies, and envisioning sustainable futures.

Managing heritage in geomorphically unstable landscapes challenges frameworks built on fixed spatial and temporal references. Focusing on Tūrau Aruhe (the former Seacliff Asylum) in coastal Otago, this paper treats the landscape as a “taskscape” of movement, decay, and maintenance. Triangulating LiDAR-derived terrain models, GNSS field observations, and archival representational sequences, it develops an analytical framework across three registers: material, narrative, and institutional lines. The paper examines where these lines align, diverge, or sever, framing heritage legibility as a relational accomplishment shaped by interdependencies between human and more-than-human agents, materials, whenua, institutional frames, and everyday practices. In response to the conference theme Tūhono, it asks how critical heritage studies might approach inherited dualisms (tangible/intangible, natural/cultural) as matters of ongoing alignment rather than fixed categories, and considers what may be lost when heritage accounts are prematurely stabilised in changing environments.

Ancient matter morphs below the dirt in discourse with other earthly entities. Bugs, bacteria, microbes and, later, trowels, microscopes, and storage facilities together make up some of the contexts in which archaeological material is made present as Heritage. This paper, ethnographically grounded in representations of the Coastal Stone Age in Western France, considers how such matter is involved with human processes of Heritage production. Following a group of objects from excavation to archaeological labs and museum exhibitions, I engage with the human-material relations that produce Heritage in a time when sustainability and human/material futures are increasingly uncertain. With an object-oriented and audio-visual approach, I ask how attention to the intra-acting of this most ancient of Heritage matter can be used to practically and actively shape sustainable futures. This project forms a part of the MSCA Horizon Europe doctoral network ArCHe: Past, present, and future of a hidden prehistoric legacy.