A Different Way to Organize World Heritage Sites

Most places in the world have experienced colonization. Countries have responded to this history in different ways toward developing their heritage identity. This is reflected in the sites inscribed onto UNESCO’s World Heritage site’s list. On UNESCO’s website, the World Heritage list is organized by country, region, year, name, and protection. While this provides a top-down approach to organize the list, it does not provide much context to the importance of these nominations.

To provide more context to the nomination of cultural sites, I propose that the list is also organized around three subcategories revolving around colonialism: pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial. These additional categories would provide additional context to the type of heritage sites that countries nominate to the World Heritage list. To explore this type of organization further, World Heritage sites from Sri Lanka and Peru are used as an example

Sri Lanka has six cultural sites and two natural sites.

Pre-Colonial Sites

Colonial Sites

Post-Colonial Sites

Peru has eight cultural sites, the Historical Centre of the City of Arequipa being listed twice because it is a blend of colonialism and pre-colonialism architecture, two natural sites, and two mixed sites.

Pre Colonial Sites

Colonial Sites

Post-Colonial Sites

In the analysis of the sites from Peru and Sri Lanka two things come to the front on the conversation due to this form of orginization. The first is the emphasis of the amount of precolonial sites on the World Heritage List. Both Sri Lanka and Peru have listed more sites of their cultural past that are important to the country before colonialism occurred. The second is that these two countries have not inscribed any post-colonial sites on the list. This is a common occurrence across the website with other countries. This may be due in part that the view of cultural heritage lies mostly in the past and that as time moves forward we may see more sites from the post-colonial period on the World Heritage List.

Something that this form of organization provides is an understanding that there are significantly more pre-colonial sites listed on the World Heritage list than colonial or post-colonial sites. There are also very few post-colonial sites listed on the World Heritage list. This can be for many reasons including hostile feelings still felt by countries who have been colonized. It will be interesting to see as time moves forward and more sites are added to the list how the three different categories will compare and the possibility of adding more categories to this method.

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