More than 48 shipwrecks have been illicitly salvaged - and the figure may be much higher. Museums can play a key role in the protection of these wrecks, alongside strategic recovery and legislative steps.
Australia has more than 200 Big Things, from the heritage-listed Pineapple to a giant Captain Cook. What are we to do with these structures as they age and decay? And should we be building new ones?
The belief that ancient Egyptians needed help from supernatural beings to built the Giza pyramids relies, unavoidably, on racism and colonial attitudes.
The Great Mosque of Mosul - with its iconic leaning minaret - appeared on one of Iraq’s banknotes. Its destruction by the Islamic State is an act of great symbolic importance.
Archaeologists this week found that more than half of of HMAS Perth, a WWII wreck in Indonesia, has disappeared. It’s now a race to protect the millions of other wrecks and sunken cities lying under the oceans.
Murujuga, or the Burrup Peninsula, is home to over a million rock artworks. But as concern grows about the impact of industrial pollution on the art, the WA government continues to play down the area’s heritage value.
An anthropologist of the American West argues that protecting nature and our cultural heritage are good for business but few recognize how they are threatened by ‘jobs-creating’ oil pipelines.
It is important to prosecute militants who destroy antiquities. But ‘everyday’ development - from dams flooding towns to the impact of mining on Indigenous rock art – does vastly more damage to heritage than war.
Hair has long been modified for aesthetic and other ends. But skewed power structures have meant that women, particularly women of colour, have borne the brunt of stereotyping and prejudice.
Repatriation of cultural heritage is being debated at a time of mass migration – is heritage more important to countries that increasingly cannot be defined by their populations?
Nina M. Versaggi, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Cultural resource management archaeologists don’t choose where they dig. Instead they identify, evaluate and preserve cultural heritage sites in locations slated for development.