Cultural heritage is material – tangible and intangible – that signifies a culture’s history or legacy. It has become a venue for contestation, ranging in scale from protesting to violently claimed and destroyed. But who defines what is to be preserved and what is to be erased? As cultural heritage becomes increasingly significant across the world, the number of issues for critical analysis and, hopefully, mediation, arise. The issue stems from various groups: religious, ethnic, national, political, and others come together to claim, appropriate, use, exclude, or erase markers and manifestations of their own and others’ cultural heritage as a means for asserting, defending, or denying critical claims to power, land, and legitimacy. Can cultural heritage be well managed and promoted while at the same time kept within parameters so as to diminish contestation? The cases herein rage from Greece, Spain, Egypt, the UK, Syria, Zimbabwe, Italy, the Balkans, Bénin, and Central America.

Cultural heritage is material – tangible and intangible – that signifies a culture’s history or legacy. It has become a venue for contestation, ranging in scale from protesting to violently claimed and destroyed. But who defines what is to be preserved and what is to be erased? As cultural heritage becomes increasingly significant across the world, the number of issues for critical analysis and, hopefully, mediation, arise. The issue stems from various groups: religious, ethnic, national, political, and others come together to claim, appropriate, use, exclude, or erase markers and manifestations of their own and others’ cultural heritage as a means for asserting, defending, or denying critical claims to power, land, and legitimacy. Can cultural heritage be well managed and promoted while at the same time kept within parameters so as to diminish contestation? The cases herein rage from Greece, Spain, Egypt, the UK, Syria, Zimbabwe, Italy, the Balkans, Bénin, and Central America.

Jane M. Gaines examines the phenomenon of images as property, focusing on the legal staus of mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. Bridging the fields of critical legal studies and cultural studies, she analyzes copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law, asking how the law constructs works of authorship and who owns the country's cultural heritage.

While the archaeological legacies of Greece and Cyprus are often considered to represent some of the highest values of Western civilization—democracy, progress, aesthetic harmony, and rationalism—this much adored and heavily touristed heritage can quickly become the stage for clashes over identity and memory. In Contested Antiquity, Esther Solomon curates explorations of how those who safeguard cultural heritage are confronted with the best ways to represent this heritage responsibly. How should visitors be introduced to an ancient Byzantine fortification that still holds the grim reminders of the cruel prison it was used as until the 1980s? How can foreign archaeological institutes engage with another nation's heritage in a meaningful way? What role do locals have in determining what is sacred, and can this sense of the sacred extend beyond buildings to the surrounding land? Together, the essays featured in Contested Antiquity offer fresh insights into the ways ancient heritage is negotiated for modern times.

The concept of ‘cultural heritage’ has acquired increasing currency in culture, politics and societies in East Asia. However, in spite of a number of research projects in this field, our understanding of how the past and its material expressions have been perceived, conceptualised and experienced in this part of the world, and how these views affect contemporary local practices and notions of identity, particularly in a period of rapid economic development and increasing globalisation, is still very unclear. Preoccupation with cultural heritage - expressed in the rapid growth of national and private museums, the expansion of the antiquities’ market, revitalisation of local traditions, focus on ‘intangible cultural heritage’ and the development of cultural tourism - is something that directly or indirectly affects national policies and international relations. An investigation of how the concept of ‘cultural heritage’ has been and continues to be constructed in East Asia, drawing on several case studies taken from China, Japan and Korea, is thus timely and worthwhile.

Against the backdrop of international conventions and their implementation, Cultural Property and Contested Ownership explores how highly-valued cultural goods are traded and negotiated among diverging parties and their interests. Cultural artefacts, such as those kept and trafficked between art dealers, private collectors and museums, have become increasingly localized in a ‘Bermuda triangle’ of colonialism, looting and the black market, with their re-emergence resulting in disputes of ownership and claims for return. This interdisciplinary volume provides the first book-length investigation of the changing behaviours resulting from the effect of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The collection considers the impact of the Convention on the way antiquity dealers, museums and auction houses, as well as nation states and local communities, address issues of provenance, contested ownership, and the trafficking of cultural property. The book contains a range of contributions from anthropologists, lawyers, historians and archaeologists. Individual cases are examined from a bottom-up perspective and assessed from the viewpoint of international law in the Epilogue. Each section is contextualised by an introductory chapter from the editors.

Essays looking at heritage practices and the construction of the past, along with how they can be used to build a national identity. The preservation of architectural monuments has played a key role in the formation of national identities from the nineteenth century to the present. The task of maintaining the collective memories and ideas of a shared heritage often focused on the historic built environment as the most visible sign of a link with the past. The meaning of such monuments and sites has, however, often been the subject of keen dispute: whose heritage is being commemorated, by whom and for whom? The answers to such questions are not always straightforward, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, the recent history of which has been characterized by territorial disputes, the large-scale movement of peoples, and cultural dispossession. This volume considers the dilemmas presented by the recent and complex histories of European states such as Germany, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Examining the effect ofthe destruction of buildings by war, the loss of territories, or the "unwanted" built heritage of the Communist and Nazi regimes, the contributors examine how architectural and urban sites have been created, destroyed, or transformed, in the attempt to make visible a national heritage. Matthew Rampley is Professor of History of Art at the University of Birmingham. Contributors: Matthew Rampley, Juliet Kinchin, Paul Stirton, SusanneJaeger, Arnold Bartetzky, Jacek Friedrich, Tania Vladova, George Karatzas, Riitta Oittinen