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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B5. Istanbul 2004 
illustrates a problem of scale and precision when a decision is 
made to document a monument. 
We presented on purpose these three examples as they illustrate 
the wide range of documentation options required, from country 
level to monument level, but also the difficult decisions to be 
taken about the scale of the documentation, the amount of 
information to be collected, and the priority list to be compiled 
when hundreds of monuments are in the same condition of risk. 
For the purpose of a practical approach to the problem, we will 
discuss heritage at risk, how CIPA positions itself today, and 
we will end with some trends that are observed today. 
2. HERITAGE AT RISK 
In a paper that Palumbo presented three years ago at a 
conference in Corinth, later published by the Getty in the 
Proceedings of that same conference, he illustrated various 
types of threats that affect our heritage. Although we 
immediately think of threats such as earthquakes, fire, and 
material decay brought by atmospheric phenomena and water as 
the most common cause of damage, in reality most of these 
natural occurrences are caused or increased by human 
intervention on the natural landscape. By modifying the 
environment, humans have created the conditions for natural 
phenomena to have a stronger effect on what we build. There 
are also direct effects on our built heritage through pollution, 
insensitive development, abandonment, excessive tourism 
pressure, and, as we have seen also from examples above, war. 
Unconventional wars today have heavy consequences on 
cultural heritage. Many of the recent wars have ethnic origins, 
such as the recent Kosovo events. 
  
Holy Trinity Monastery, Musuliste, Serbia 
Photo from http://www.kosovo.convestrojica.html 
In these wars the first casualties are civilians (because of clear 
attempts at ethnic cleansing) and cultural heritage sites, for the 
same reason, as they represent the traces on the ground of the 
"enemy". Very often, cultural heritage is targeted first because 
it is easier to get at. In recent Kosovo events, Serbian 
monasteries were burnt by mobs and in revenge mosques were 
burnt in Serbia. 
Another consequence of war is the instability and the lack of 
law enforcement that in theory should be ensured by the 
occupying forces (a point stressed in the The Hague convention 
on the protection of cultural heritage in case of war, of 1956 
and of its second protocol of 1999, a convention that 
    
unfortunately has not been signed or ratified by the UK and the 
USA). 
   
Holy Trinity Monastery, Musuliste, Serbia 
Photo from http://www.kosovo.com/estrojica.html 
  
The lack of law enforcement creates the condition for 
widespread looting and vandalism, which has been epitomized 
in the destruction of the Baghdad Museum in April 2003 and 
the still ongoing salvage clandestine activities on some of the 
most important archaeological sites of Iraq. 
But as we mentioned above risk is not only consequence of 
malicious acts or natural forces. Development is probably the 
cause for most damage to cultural resources, as it is linked to 
notions of progress, to the need for more and better 
infrastructures and resources, to the need for housing and 
agricultural land. This translates in huge areas being bulldozed 
or totally transformed to the benefit of the new project. One 
example of this is the Dampier region of North west Australia, 
where port and infrastructure expansion threatens to destroy a 
large number of rock art sites through construction. and 
atmospheric pollution. 
    
Threatened Rock Art, Dampier, Australia 
Photo by R. Bednarik, 
http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/dampier/web/index.html 
The impact not only is on the innumerable unknown cultural 
resources (we mentioned above the need for comprehensive 
lists of archaeological sites which are rarely prepared by the 
agencies in charge of heritage conservation) but also and more 
importantly on the context of these sites, on the landscapes that 
millennia of human use made truly cultural, in the sense of 
stratification and accumulations of changes over time, without 
radical and irreversible transformations that are characterizing 
our approach to land use and “modernization”. 
Jargor 
     
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
    
   
   
   
  
   
   
   
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
    
   
   
   
  
   
   
   
   
   
  
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