Cultural heritage management

Possible threats include urban development, large-scale agriculture, mining activity, looting, erosion or unsustainable visitor numbers.

While archaeological sites remain the primary focus for many CHM professionals, others research historical records or on ethnohistorical projects.

In North America, survey normally includes either walking ploughed fields in 5–10-metre transects or digging shovel test pits at the same intervals.

If artifacts are found, the next stage of investigation is usually digging and sifting a spaced grid of test pits (1 m by 1 m trenches) to determine how large or significant the site is.

Mitigation also includes construction techniques which ensure that archaeological remains are protected in undisturbed parts of the site or even underneath the development.

Preservation legislation has ensured that no valuable site will be destroyed by construction without study, but the work of rescue archaeologists is sometimes controversial.

Some academic archaeologists do not take archaeological rescue or salvage work seriously because of its emphasis on site identification and preservation rather than intensive study and analysis.

The large number of reports written on the thousands of sites dug each year are not necessarily published in public forums.

Some initiatives, notably the OASIS project Archived 2002-06-03 at the Wayback Machine of the Archaeological Data Service in the UK, are beginning to make the reports available to everyone.

Curation refers to the long-term preservation and retention of heritage assets and to providing access to them in a variety of forms.

Fragile heritage assets may need to be preserved in a special environment, and protected from light (especially ultra-violet), humidity, fluctuations in temperature and in some cases, oxygen from the air.

Within a single museum, a range of approaches may be used including interpretative panels, presenting artefacts in a realistic setting as they would have been experienced, and creating interactive and virtual exhibits.

Interpretative panels, and other signage, such as Blue plaques in the UK are important in ensuring that cultural heritage is understood in the context of the local community.

Some countries such as India and the members of the African union have recognised the importance of cultural resources and established government departments to manage them.