Origins and Influence of the Nara Document on Authenticity
Author(s): Herb Stovel
Source: APT Bulletin, Vol. 39, No. 2/3 (2008), pp. 9-17
Published by: Association for Preservation Technology International (APT)
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Origins and Influence of the Nara Document on
Authenticity
HERB STOVEL
This paper examines the origins and
influence of the Nara Document on
Authenticity (Nara, Japan, 1994) on
conservation attitudes and
approaches in the particular context
of the World Heritage Committee's
operations and beyond, into the
workaday world of conservation.
Assessing the Impact of the Nara
Document
This paper looks briefly and selectively
at how the concept of authenticity
was
treated in the three decades prior to the
Nara meeting. It then looks at the influ
ence of the Nara Document by review
ing the results of several key regional
follow-up meetings that applied the
themes of Nara in a
particular regional
context (SanAntonio for the Americas,
Great Zimbabwe for Africa, and Riga
for Eastern Europe). The paper con
cludes by looking at a number of the
challenges that remain before theWorld
Heritage Committee and the larger
conservation field in attempting to
strengthen
use of the authenticity
con
cept in meaningful ways in conservation
practice.
Fig. 1. One of the sources of the Nara meeting was the feeling of Japanese conservation profession
als that their approaches to conservation were misunderstood. The example most cited was the false
contention inmany Western publications that the Japanese ritually rebuilt replicas of their temples on
adjacent sites every twenty years
? a practice in fact limited inmodern times to one Shinto shrine,
the Ise Shrine, seen here. Photograph ? Jingu-shicho.
The Nara Document on Authenticity
marked a watershed moment in modern
conservation history. Agreed to by those
participating in theNara meeting in
1994, itwas the first effort in the 30
years since the Venice Charter to at
tempt to put in place
a set of interna
tionally applicable conservation princi
ples. Yet while reflecting an important
international consensus, the Nara Docu
ment also marked the final stage of the
move from belief in universal interna
tional absolutes, first introduced by the
Venice Charter, toward acceptance of
conservation judgments
as
necessarily
relative and contextual. Both of these
perceived gains have been recognized
primarily in hindsight, however.
The originators of theNara meeting
had more prosaic benefits inmind,
however. They wished simply to extend
the range of attributes through which
authenticity might be recognized in
order to accommodate within itmain
stream Japanese conservation practices
?
namely the periodic dismantling,
repair, and reassembly of wooden tem
ples
? so that Japan would feelmore
comfortable about submitting World
Heritage nominations for international
review (Figs. 1 and 2).1 This aim was
accomplished by returning to a frame
work more closely in tune with the
framework from which theWorld Her
itage test of authenticity had originally
emerged (including the integrity require
ment, which had underlain analysis of
historic properties for inclusion on the
National Register of Historic Places in
the United States) and its inclusion of
dynamic,
or
process-based, attributes.2
While theNara meeting did produce a
more broadly drawn technical frame
work for authenticity analysis, theNara
Document at a more
profound level also
created the conceptual conditions to
legitimize Japanese (andmany other
9
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10 APT BULLETIN: JOURNAL OF PRESERVATION TECHNOLOGY / 39:2-3, 2008
Fig. 2. In fearing thatWorld Heritage nominations would be judged within Eurocentric frameworks,
the Japanese were also concerned that existing widespread conservation practices
?
such as the
top-to-bottom periodic dismantling and reassembly of significant religious structures
?
would also
not be understood byWestern evaluators. Photograph by the author, 1993, ? ICCROM.
culturally imbedded) conservation prac
tices by recognizing that
all judgments about values attributed to cultural
properties as well as the credibility of related
information sources may differ from culture to
culture, and even within the same culture. It is
thus not possible to base judgements of values
and authenticity within fixed criteria. On the
contrary, the respect due to all cultures requires
that heritage properties must be considered and
judged within the cultural contexts to which
they belong.3
The Nara discussions also laid to rest a
number of long-standing technical
delusions that had limited the possibil
ity to use authenticity in practical ways
to guide decision making.
The first of these scientific delusions
to be corrected was the idea that authen
ticity
was a value in its own
right,
though some of those present during the
Nara meeting made this argument.
Natalia Dushkina of ICOMOS Russia,
for example, suggested that the material
(form, setting, techniques) and the non
material (function, use, tradition, spirit)
"used to be the bearers of authenticity in
a monument" and that "they transmit
ted authenticity to us and thus are rela
tive to it" and that therefore "authentic
ity is a value category of culture."4
Annex 4 of the version of the Opera
tional Guidelines for the Implementation
of theWorld Heritage Convention
prepared by the Advisory Bodies to the
World Heritage Committee inMarch
2003 stated the following:
Authenticity is not a value itself. Properties do
not merit inscription on theWorld Heritage List
simply because they are greatly authentic; rather,
inscribed properties must demonstrate first their
claim to "outstanding universal value," and then
demonstrate that the attributes carrying related
values are "authentic," that is, genuine, real,
truthful, credible.5
The distinction being made here is that
authenticity choices can be understood
as reflective of the values of those doing
the choosing but do not themselves
constitute heritage values.
The second scientific clarification
involved refuting the contention that
authenticity could be understood as an
absolute. Insistence on an absolute
approach is still present in the current
National Register of Historic Places
practice for evaluating integrity: "His
toric properties either retain integrity
(that is, convey their significance) or
they do not."6While this approach may
have been present in the original Ameri
can concept and subsequently grafted
onto World Heritage practice, it is now
accepted inWorld Heritage circles that
authenticity analysis is very much con
cerned with relative measurement.
Natalia Dushkina illustrated this in
her paper forNara:
Authenticity can be easily diagnosed, when each
of its bearers will be examined independently of
each other. It is different, when all the compo
nents are studied simultaneously. This pattern
provides for partial loss of authenticity in each
of them (e.g., material authenticity is intact, but
the function has changed, there is a loss of the
original form, etc.). The examination has a
relative character and can add to the dissonance
of the whole. Here it is necessary to find the
threshold before which the monument authentic
ity is not yet lost and can be perceived as it is.7
The March 2003 Advisory Bodies'
version of Annex 4 of the Operational
Guidelines confirmed this view by
suggesting that
Authenticity is not an absolute qualifier. It is
meaningless to state that such and such a prop
erty is "undeniably authentic." Authenticity is a
relative concept and must always be used in
relation to the ability of particular attributes to
express clearly the nature of key recognized
values.8
The third scientific clarification in
volved challenging the idea that authen
ticity had to be present in all attribute
areas (that is, in relation to those all
possible attributes expressing
or carry
ing defined heritage values relevant to
World Heritage analysis
?
form, design,
setting, etc.) for a site to be considered
authentic. Early discussion of the four
authenticities of theWorld Heritage test
of authenticity
?
design, material,
setting, and workmanship, themselves
adapted from the integrity requirements
for nominating sites to theNational
Register of Historic Places maintained
by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior
?
acknowledged that these qualities were
to be treated "as a
composite."9 While
ICOMOS Secretary General Dr. Ernest
Allan Connally argued for this interpre
tation in dealing with World Heritage
sites when the first version of the test of
authenticity was defined in 1977, cur
rent practice in nominating sites to the
National Register of Historic Places
argues the contrary, namely that
to retain historic integrity a property will always
possess several, and usually most, of the aspects.
The retention of specific aspects of integrity is
paramount for a property to convey its signifi
cance. Determining which of these aspects are
most important to a particular property requires
knowing why, where, and when the property is
significant.10
The fourth scientific clarification fo
cused on improving understanding of
the importance of authenticity. Never
mentioned in early conservation de
bates, a focus on "why" has helped give
precision to the articulation of the
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ORIGINS AND INFLUENCE OF THE NARA DOCUMENT ON AUTHENTICITY 11
"how." While the Venice Charter, with
out accompanying explanation, merely
suggests that monuments should be
preserved "in the full richness of their
authenticity,"11 the Nara Document
devotes articles 4, 9 and 10 to the
"why."
4. In aworld that is increasingly subject to the
forces of globalization and homogenization, and
in aworld inwhich the search for cultural
identity is sometimes pursued through aggressive
nationalism and the suppression of the cultures
of minorities, the essential contribution made by
the consideration of authenticity in conservation
practice is to clarify and illuminate the collective
memory of humanity.
9. Conservation of cultural heritage in all its
forms and historical periods is rooted in the
values attributed to the heritage. Our ability to
understand these values depends, in part, on the
degree to which information sources about these
values may be understood as credible or truthful.
Knowledge and understanding of these sources
of information, in relation to original and sub
sequent characteristics of the cultural heritage,
and their meaning, is a requisite basis for assess
ing all aspects of authenticity.
10. Authenticity, considered in this way and
affirmed in the Charter of Venice, appears as the
essential qualifying factor concerning values.
The understanding of authenticity plays a
fundamental role in all scientific studies of the
cultural heritage, in conservation and restoration
planning, as well as within the inscription
procedures used for theWorld Heritage Conven
tion and other cultural heritage inventories.12
Ultimately perhaps themost impor
tant benefit of theNara discussions was
the impetus given to dozens of similar
discussions in countries and regions
around theworld and the optimism that
these discussions would carry the techni
cal focuses of theNara discussion to
new heights in subsequent years. Re
gional meetings were held inAfrica,
Europe, the Americas, and in many
countries around the world, including at
least three in my country, Canada. By
my count more than 50 national and
regional authenticity workshops, semi
nars, and colloquia have been held since
1994. Authenticity has become the
principal metaphor of engagement for
conservation debates for close to a
decade and a half now, and this interest
continues; the government of China held
amajor expert meeting in Beijing in
May 2007 to review conservation prac
tices at some of theWorld Heritage sites
in Beijing. Guo Zhan, current Vice
President of ICOMOS for China, re
cently stated that his goal in organizing
themeeting was to do for China what
Nara had done for Japan.13
But for all of these meetings, the
Nara Document seems to have fallen
short of the aspirations of many of its
framers.While themany subsequent
meetings helped root treatment of au
thenticity in the local cultural contexts
called for in theNara Document, for the
most part they have not moved the
authenticity discourse down the path
toward practical application or beyond
understandings in place before Nara,
nor have they helped address the two
significant issues skirted by Nara.14
This need for a practical approach to
authenticity had been signaled well
before Nara in Jukka Jokilehto's chapter
"Treatments and Authenticity" inMan
agement Guidelines for World Cultural
Heritage.15 Here Jokilehto demonstrates
conceptually how the evidence of the
four authenticities present in the original
test of authenticity
?
materials, work
manship, design, and setting
?
helps
define the aim of treatment and its
implementation. The challenge of defin
ing conceptually the possible forms of
evidence offered by various attributes
offers a useful analytical tool formaking
clear authenticity judgments and antici
pates the proofs of authenticity
men
tioned in the Declaration of San Anto
nio. However, the illustrations used by
Jokliehto are uneven and not fully devel
oped. For example, while for materials,
evidence is usefully defined to include
attributes of "original building material,
historical stratigraphy, marks made by
impact of significant phases in history,
and the process of aging (patina of
age)," for workmanship, evidence is
understood to include uniquely "sub
stance and signs of original building
technology and techniques," which
seems to overlook the material evidence
of the hand of the original or later
craftsman
?
surely
a
key focus of any
effort to retain the full testimony of
craftsmanship. Nevertheless, this chap
terwas amajor step forward in the field
at the time by suggesting how authentic
ity could be measured in tangible ways,
as an aid to conservation decision mak
ing.
One of the two major issues skirted
in the Nara Document was how to
ensure that acceptance of cultural con
text as essential in assessing conserva
tion actions and approaches would not
result in efforts to cloak arbitrary or ad
hoc decisions within the all-forgiving
mantle of cultural context. Many post
Nara commentators have complained
that theNara Document has given a
license to
unscrupulous practitioners
to
do what they wish without the need to
account for or justify their actions in
that local cultural context. This problem
could have been avoided by an article
within theNara Document which might
have read
The acceptance of the need to judge conserva
tion activity within its local cultural context does
not remove from conservation project propo
nents the need to ensure their proposals respect
the heritage values around which local consensus
has been developed, the information sources
associated with these, and locally recognized
processes of heritage transformation.
The second major issue skirted dur
ing Nara was a definition of authentic
ity.Given the reticence of Raymond
Lemaire (primary author of the Venice
Charter and later to be co-author of the
Nara Document) to pursue a definition,
the framers of theNara Document
followed the time-honored World Her
itage Convention tradition of treating
important concepts, such as
outstanding
universal value, without defining them.
However, even without a definition, the
annual need for States' Parties to show
that theirWorld Heritage nominations
meet the test of authenticity has ex
tended acceptance of the concept's
relevance to countries and cultures that
inNara complained that they did not
have aword for authenticity, and slowly,
aworking definition has found its place.
That definition concerns the quality of
communication of defined heritage
values through the significant attributes
carrying these values. This definition,
which eluded theNara wordsmiths, has
found its way into various documents
and papers in use in theWorld Heritage
context, including presence as a part of
the draft Operational Guidelines in
development in late 2003-early 2004,
and confirms the sense of the American
integrity from which theWorld Heritage
concept of authenticity was born in
1976: the ability of a property to convey
its significance.16
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12 APT BULLETIN: JOURNAL OF PRESERVATION TECHNOLOGY / 39:2-3, 2008
Pre-Nara: Considering Authenticity
from 1964 to 1993
To more fully appreciate the changes in
thinking and practice that have resulted
from theNara Document, it is useful to
understand what was meant
by authen
ticity when the Venice Charter was
written in the 1960s and to trace
changes in its use since then. As many
commentators have noted, authenticity
was used in the preamble to the Venice
Charter without qualification because,
in the European-expert world on whose
shared precepts the charter was built,
authenticity was understood by all in
the same way.
Imbued with amessage from the past, the
historic monuments of generations of people
remain to the present day as living witnesses of
their age-old traditions. People are becoming
more and more conscious of the unity of human
values and regard ancient monuments as a
common heritage. The common responsibility to
safeguard them for future generations is recog
nized. It is our duty to hand them on in the full
richness of their authenticity.17
The first known appearance of integrity
in formal systems for preservation in
the United States occurs in the 1953
National Park Service Administrative
Manual, where integrity is described as
"a composite quality connoting original
workmanship, original location, and
intangible elements of feeling and asso
ciation."18 This made-in-the-USA con
cept of integrity traveled to Europe in
the valises of then-ICOMOS Secretary
General Ernest Allan Connally and his
assistant and full-time representative in
Paris, Ann Webster Smith, for the first
meetings of fledgling World Heritage
Committee experts in 1976 and 1977.
There the concept was adopted by the
World Heritage Committee but
renamed authenticity', thanks to Ray
mond Lemaire's insistence on
extending
authenticity beyond concern for the
original, which in essence protected the
existing conceptual frameworks of the
European conservation world. The
result was aWorld Heritage test of
authenticity, which was applied to four
related physical attributes: design,
material, setting, and workmanship.
During theWorld Heritage preparatory
expert meeting ofMarch 1977 in Paris,
Connally noted that Lemaire proposed
changing integrity to authenticity "out
of concern that the rule might
seem to
restrict eligibility of monuments to
Fig. 3. Urnes Stave Church, a Norwegian church
inscribed on theWorld Heritage List, illustrates
the many interrelated aspects of authenticity
cited by Stefan Tschudi-Madsen inarchitec
turally important buildings: surface, material,
form, structure, and function. Photograph by
Jukka Jokilehto, 1995, ? ICCROM.
those with purity of original design or
form." While Connally was dubious of
intent (his notes state "the old polemic
put to rest
did
not want to revive it"),
Lemaire prevailed, and American in
tegrity became World Heritage authen
ticity. Given the American definition of
integrity (the ability of a property to
convey its significance), the change of
vocabulary has not
generally caused any
problems in application of the concept
in theWorld Heritage context.
The approach adopted forWorld
Heritage had become the norm inEu
rope by the following decade. Stefan
Tschudi-Madsen's paper "Principles in
Practice," presented at the 1984 APT
conference in Toronto, is representative
of the best of evolving European think
ing in themid-1980s. His paper explores
five different areas of authenticity:
mate
rial, structure, surface, architectural
form, and function.19 Material, struc
ture, and form recall the earlier four
tangible authenticities ofWorld Her
itage, but Tschudi-Madsen also includes
"surface" and "function," both of
which he describes as problematic, but
whose dynamic qualities anticipate
some
Fig. 4. The authenticity of the operating locks on
the Rideau Canal, a historic Canadian canal
inscribed on the World Heritage List in2007,
rests on the retention of original design forms
rather than original wooden material, now
decayed and replaced many times. Photograph
by the author.
of the discussions inNara. Surface,
described as the inevitably changing skin
of a building, pits the practical necessity
of scraping and renewing paint layers
and replacing worn building compo
nents (e.g., roof tiles) with the effort to
maintain "age value, the proof of au
thenticity" (Fig. 3).20Tschudi-Madsen
suggests that there is a conflict between
the aesthetic demands of material structure and
surface on the one hand, and the need for
authenticity on the other....a conflict between an
intentional evaluation
- an evaluation condi
tioned by the original intention of the monument
and
an historic evaluation based upon the
document as a source of information
- a docu
ment. It is very difficult to take a stand for, or
against, in such a conflict; one appeals to senti
ment, the other to knowledge.21
In speaking of function, he notes that
"the principle of authenticity often gives
way to
practical solutions because it
becomes a
question of, to be or not to
be, for the monument."22 Tschudi
Madsen's speculations about these
conflicts reveal the tension between
prevailing conventional assumptions
that authenticity resided in survival of
original material and design intent and
the emerging conviction that authentic
ity resided inwhat a selection of at
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ORIGINS AND INFLUENCE OF THE NARA DOCUMENT ON AUTHENTICITY 13
PLAN EXECUTION USE
1. Intentions
-
Objectives
-
decipherable
-
documentation
intellectual
context
2. Know-how
-
transmissions
technological
context
3. Environment
-
physical
surrowiqjngs
validity
of canal
environment
links
implications
of
know-how (2)
implications
of
materials (4)
4. Materials
-
conservation
5. Design
-
restoration
periods
decipherable
-
influences
-
documentation
6. Uses anq functions
continuity
of uses
-
congruence
interruptions
in uses
and functions
Fig. 5. This matrix was produced as an appendix to a report on the 1994 World Heritage expert
meeting on historic canals held at Chaffey's Locks on the Rideau Canal. It illustrates how, for a partic
ular type of heritage (canals), a range of authenticity indicators may be developed and used inauthen
ticity assessment at different phases of project and property management. From the UNESCO World
Heritage Committee Report on the Expert Meeting on Heritage Canals (Canada, September 1994 ),
WHC-94/CONF-003/INF.10.
tributes rooted in the particular place
and circumstances-specific values of a
historic place might reveal.
As already noted, Jukka Jokilehto's
1993 chapter "Treatments and Authen
ticity" consolidates earlier thinking
within a defined process for authenticity
analysis and provides
a
tangible refer
ence useful forNara. Here Jokilehto
suggested that treatment strategies for
cultural-heritage sites "must maintain
authenticity" by maximizing retention
of "historical material," by ensuring
"harmony with original design and
workmanship," by not allowing "new
additions to dominate over the original
fabric but respecting the archaeological
potential," and (citing theWorld Her
itage Operational Guidelines in place at
the time) meeting "the test of authentic
ity in design, material, workmanship
or
setting (and in the case of cultural land
scapes their distinctive character and
components)."23 Jokilehto introduces a
process for defining appropriate treat
ment whose "first priority is to establish,
safeguard and maintain the cultural
resource values for which aWorld Her
itage site has been included on the List"
and which seeks to ensure that "all
conservation treatments (e.g., protec
tion, consolidation or restoration) guar
antee the protection of the authenticity
of the heritage site, prolonging the
duration of its integrity and preparing it
for interpretation."24 Jokilehto defines a
set of treatment approaches ranging
from protection to anastylosis and then
discusses the implications of each possi
ble treatment with respect to authentic
ity of material, design, workmanship,
and setting. In the end, this approach
leads the analyst to understand the need
for particular operations at a microscale:
preventing, revealing, replacing,
remov
ing, consolidating, maintaining, rein
forcing
?
all taken together providing
a
detailed, authenticity-based prescription
for needed intervention.
An expert World Heritage meeting
on
the evaluation of potential nominations
of historic canals to theWorld Heritage
List took place at Chaffey's Locks along
the Rideau Canal, near Ottawa, On
tario, in September 1994, just three
months before theNara meeting (Fig.
4). The discussion focused in part on
how to apply the test of authenticity to
heritage canals, understood as linear
corridors with the characteristics of
cultural landscapes. The meeting report
presented to theWorld Heritage Com
mittee devotes an annex to the technical
analysis of authenticity:
Itwas felt useful to expand the aspects of
authenticity examined from the four currently
noted in the Operational Guidelines, to associate
these with criteria or indicators which could
suggest how authenticity of canals might best be
measured in relation to each of the aspects
considered and to examine these within a time
continuum including project planning, execution
and ongoing use. Itwas felt important to stress
that the resulting matrix was not meant to be
used in a directive or mechanistic fashion, but to
provide a guiding framework for consideration
of a range of evidently interdependent factors,
and ultimately to provide an integrated overview
of these various factors.25
The matrix in Figure 5 was meant to
define potential indicators of authentic
itywithin an array of attributes relevant
to the heritage typology being examined
and to verify relevance of these indica
tors in a time framework focused on
design conception (plan), design imple
mentation (execution), and long-term
operations (use). The use of thismatrix
was intended to show how a multi
faceted effort to measure the authentic
ity of complex heritage could support
exploration of possible approaches to
treatment.
Post-Nara: Meetings, Influences, and
Consolidation within the World
Heritage System
While many significant authenticity
discussions inmany different contexts
took place after Nara, perhaps the most
significant of these were meetings in San
Antonio, Texas, in 1996 (bringing
together experts from the Americas and
resulting in the Declaration of San
Antonio); inGreat Zimbabwe in 1999
(bringing together experts from Africa);
and inRiga, Latvia, in 2000 (bringing
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14 APT BULLETIN: JOURNAL OF PRESERVATION TECHNOLOGY / 39:2-3, 2008
Fig. 6. The late 1990s reconstruction of Black
head's House, in theWorld Heritage site of
Riga, Latvia, on a prominent site in the town's
central square, helped shape discussions that
led to the adoption of the Riga Charter, estab
lishing the limits and conditions within which
such reconstructions should be considered
appropriate in conservation frameworks. Photo
graph by the author.
together 100 experts from Eastern
Europe and resulting in the Riga Char
ter on Authenticity and Historical
Reconstruction inRelationship to Cul
tural Heritage).
The Interamerican Symposium
on
Authenticity in the Conservation and
Management of the Cultural Heritage,
supported by US/ICOMOS and the
Getty Conservation Institute, took place
in San Antonio inMarch 1996 and
brought together
a
large group of ener
getic participants from almost all ICO
MOS national committees of North,
Central, and South America to debate
the application of the concepts of Nara.
The meeting adopted the Declaration of
San Antonio, which discussed the rela
tionship between authenticity and, in
sequence, identity, history, materials,
social value, dynamic and static sites,
stewardship, and economics. Review of
the document 11 years later reveals the
degree towhich itwas rooted in the
need to affirm the special cultural char
acter of the region
as a basis for under
standing its authenticity.
Within the cultural diversity of the Americas,
groups with separate identities co-exist in the
same space and time and at times across space
and time, sharing cultural manifestations, but
often assigning different values to them. No
nation in the Americas has a single national
identity; our diversity makes up the sum of our
national identities. The authenticity of our cul
tural resources lies in the identification, evalua
tion and interpretation of their true values as
perceived by our ancestors in the past and by
ourselves now as an evolving and diverse com
munity.26
The Declaration also suggested extend
ing the "proofs" of authenticity to
include reflection of its true value,
integrity, context, identity, use, and
function. This was an effort to link
directly to earlier Nara discussions in
order to identify appropriate proofs
relative to redefined "information
sources," but these results were
simply
reported without efforts to situate them
within the larger framework of Nara.
The Declaration concluded with awell
intentioned but seemingly futile effort
to rewrite many of the articles of Nara;
this effort has had no impact on later
revisions of theWorld Heritage Opera
tional Guidelines, which have incorpo
rated portions of text verbatim from the
Nara Document.
Another significant regional meeting
concerning authenticity and integrity in
an African context was
organized by the
World Heritage Centre and held in
Great Zimbabwe onMay 26-29, 2000.
The publication resulting from this
meeting featured an extraordinarily rich
set of case studies and observations from
18 speakers who looked at issues arising
from maintaining authenticity and
integrity in themanagement of cultural
and natural heritage inAfrica.27 Unlike
many other meetings
on
authenticity
that followed Nara, the Great Zim
babwe meeting did not result in adop
tion of a document or charter. However,
the synthesis report prepared,
as with
the report of the San Antonio meeting,
strongly affirmed the special nature and
character of heritage of the region
?
in
this case, Africa ? and included some
suggestions about how this understand
ing could be better taken up inWorld
Heritage operations. Concluding
re
marks byWorld Heritage Committee
member and meeting organizer Dawson
Munjeri were directed at theWorld
Heritage Committee and its ability to
recognize what was most important
about African World Heritage nomina
tions. Munjeri "stated firmly that the
world's resolve in genuinely addressing
the issue of imbalance on theWorld
Heritage List will depend very much on
how the issue of cultural criterion (vi) is
dealt with. The African voice is unequiv
ocal in this issue, 'criterion (vi)must
stand in its own
right.'"28
The meeting publication also in
cluded a set of recommendations, which,
again like San Antonio, included possi
ble improvements to the text of the
Nara Document including identification
of management systems, language, and
other forms of intangible heritage
among attributes expressing authentic
ity, and a strong suggestion of the need
to give greater emphasis to the place of
local communities in a sustainable her
itage management process. Perhaps
because of the strong involvement of the
World Heritage Centre in organizing
this meeting, the recommendations
concerning these new attributes have all
been included in authenticity informa
tion sources in the 2005 version of the
World Heritage Operational Guidelines.
The Riga Charter on Authenticity
and Historical Reconstruction inRela
tionship to Cultural Heritage, developed
in theWorld Heritage City of Riga,
Latvia, in 2000 with the leadership of
ICCROM, was a regional meeting
focused on a
particular aspect of authen
ticity, that of reconstruction.29 The
meeting had been convened to confront
a sudden proliferation of "in-authentic
reconstructions" in the newly liberated
former Soviet Union republics where the
search for symbols of statehood often
seemed to result in the re-creation of
former monuments with little or no
regard for historical pertinence,
accu
racy, or context. The conclusions of the
Riga Charter clearly reflect the discus
sions of Nara, including a definition
used in theNara meeting but not in
cluded in the document ("authenticity is
ameasure of the degree towhich the
attributes of cultural heritage [including
form and design, materials and sub
stance, use and function, traditions and
techniques, location and setting, and
spirit and feeling, and other factors]
credibly and accurately bear witness to
their significance"). The Riga Charter
also includes a conclusion sympathetic
to Nara, which in part states that "repli
cation of cultural heritage is in general a
misrepresentation of evidence of the
past, and that each architectural work
should reflect the time of its own cre
ation, in the belief that sympathetic new
buildings
can maintain the environmen
tal context." While the Riga Charter
seems not yet to have found itsway into
standard sets ofWorld Heritage doctri
nal texts, it has been accepted as a key
reference in numerous countries outside
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ORIGINS AND INFLUENCE OF THE NARA DOCUMENT ON AUTHENTICITY 15
Fig. 7. The reconstruction of buildings that could
act as symbols of newfound national identity
was a common tendency in the former re
publics of the Soviet Union, as here with the
reconstructed Palace of the Grand Duke in the
World Heritage city inVilnius, Lithuania, in2003.
While an argument could be made for the
reconstruction of Blackhead's House on a site
vacant since World War II (see Fig. 6), the
reconstruction of the Vilnius Palace ismore
questionable: the reconstruction was achieved
at the expense of portions of a 200-year-old
Russian barracks, and the facades of the recon
structed palace were based on very limited
iconographie evidence. Photograph by the
author.
the Baltic region, including Greece,
where it has been used in assessing
reconstruction strategies for the Par
thenon, and in the UK, where it has
been accepted
as a
key document under
lying the English Heritage Policy State
ment on Restoration, Reconstruction
and Speculative Recreation of Archaeo
logical Sites including Ruins (Figs. 6 and
7).30This Policy Statement notes that
participants
at a
regional meeting in
Eastern Europe agreed that the Riga
Charter "has wider application....and
that the Charter re-establishes the pre
sumption against reconstruction except
in very special circumstances and re
iterates that itmust in no way be specu
lative."31
Slowly, with the aid of the visibility
and credibility conferred by the conclu
sions of these and other related meet
ings, the Nara Document has begun to
find official acceptance in theWorld
Heritage world.
During the 1999 International Gen
eral Assembly of ICOMOS, held five
years after the Nara Document was first
adopted, the document was formally
adopted by an ICOMOS General As
sembly and became a part of the body of
doctrine supported and promoted by
ICOMOS. In practice, theNara Docu
ment had been used since themid-1990s
by the Advisory Bodies, the UNESCO
World Heritage Centre, and theWorld
Heritage Committee informally in the
analysis of nominations to theWorld
Heritage List. The most recent revision
of theWorld Heritage Operational
Guidelines (begun in 1999 and autho
rized in 2005) formally incorporated the
conclusions of Nara to
guide articula
tion of the section on
authenticity. In
deed, several of the articles of theNara
Document are now
reproduced nearly
verbatim within the 2005 Operational
Guidelines: article 80 of the OGs repro
duces most of article 9 of Nara, and
article 81 reproduces
?
nearly word for
word ? article 11 of Nara. Article 82 of
the OGs borrows heavily from article 13
of Nara but extends theNara list of
"information sources" (form and design,
materials and substance, use and func
tion, traditions and techniques, location
and setting, and spirit and feeling, and
other internal and external factors) to
include management systems, and lan
guage, and other forms of intangible
heritage derived from the conclusions of
the Great Zimbabwe meeting.32
Post-Nara: Future Challenges
The search for authenticity over the last
15 years may not have brought about
fully the desired shared clarity of mean
ing and use, but it has certainly high
lighted the apparent importance of the
quest. This paper has attempted to
analyze the most relevant observations
about meaning and use of the concept
of authenticity made before, during,
and subsequent to the development of
the Nara Document, in order to trace
themain lines of thinking in the debate
and in particular
to suggest what role
the use of this concept could play in
contemporary conservation analysis and
decision making. A number of impor
tant
challenges remain, however, in
efforts to bring use of authenticity to
greater effectiveness in conservation
thinking and decision making.
One of themost visible challenges,
particularly evident in theWorld Her
itage context, is the limited understand
ing of the concept in those preparing
nominations, in spite of the long-time,
expert focus on
improving processes for
evaluating authenticity forWorld Her
itage. Each year ICOMOS finds itself
forced to
interpret
or re-work what
States' Parties submit in the name of
authenticity in nomination documents,
because the submissions often limit
analysis of authenticity
to
meaningless
statements such as "this property is
unquestionably authentic." In other
cases, the State Party has not caught up
to the Operational Guidelines. For
example, even though World Heritage
authenticity was born in practice in the
U.S., the current National Park Service
guidelines for preparation of possible
future nominations to the World Her
itage List note
mistakenly that authen
ticity resides in the survival of "original
material."33 These problems lie in the
frameworks used nationally for analysis,
which often ignore the available cues in
the Operational Guidelines, or, as seen
above, the references used are out of
date. These problems demonstrate the
difficulty of transmitting the nuances of
an expert debate to the operational level
in meaningful ways.
In my view, improvement could be
gained by developing reference models
showing tangible authenticity indicators
of the state of conservation of historic
places, along the lines of the frameworks
introduced during theWorld Heritage
Rideau Canal expert meeting of 1994
and also explored by Jokilehto in the
chapter
on treatments and authenticity.
The search for monitoring
measures
and indicators has become a major
preoccupation of those in the conserva
tion field over the last 15 years. This
emphasis is a reflection of the growing
commitment to
improving management
frameworks for care of cultural heritage
through the use of monitoring, which is
understood as a key component of the
management process. Treated as a word
that expresses conservation goals
?
maintaining and enhancing authenticity
?
the concept of authenticity provides
a
significant opportunity to define indica
tors in very tangible ways.
The opportunity tomove in this
direction is already in place. The recent
World Heritage expert meeting on
Benchmarks and Chapter IV of the
Operational Guidelines (April 2007)34
focused on the importance of using
understanding of authenticity and in
tegrity in monitoring state of conserva
tion. Recommendation Number One
states that "TheWorld Heritage Com
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16 APT BULLETIN: JOURNAL OF PRESERVATION TECHNOLOGY / 39:2-3, 2008
mittee should formally adopt
a monitor
ing framework forWorld Heritage sites
which is rooted in the outstanding uni
versal value of the sites." Recommenda
tion Number Four further notes that the
statement of outstanding universal value
"should include the qualifying condi
tions of authenticity/integrity, specific
attributes or features of the sitewhich
carry its outstanding universal value."35
A second challenge is the need to
close the gap between the results of
technically proficient approaches to
maintaining authenticity in the transfor
mation of buildings having recognized
heritage importance and the tourism
driven transformations that trivialize
this experience.
The search for authenticity has al
ways had the power tomove heritage
professionals charged with shaping
various historic elements of their envi
ronment, but ithas also had the power
to touch members of the public who
seek to find meaning in their cultural
environment. In fact the public is no less
discerning than the professionals and no
less interested in experiencing cultures
and cultural manifestations in their
fullest authenticity. Heritage profession
als should identify opportunities to
include those guiding the larger experi
ence of place in communities (for exam
ple, those involved with development of
tourism) in these debates, rather than
continuing to debate authenticity exclu
sively among themselves. Of course,
while the goal of such a dialogue may
not be easy to achieve (the very presence
of tourists in a visited spot alters the
authentic local quality of the place),
certainly today this dialogue is hardly
present. If theWorld Heritage Commit
tee Periodic Reporting system reports
that many managers of sites on the
World Heritage List cannot articulate
their site's outstanding universal value,
then can we expect
more from a
region's
tourism managers? Perhaps theWorld
Heritage Committee could be encour
aged to organize a series of regional
workshops bringing tourism and conser
vation professionals together
to develop
some possible place-specific model
approaches for communicating the
importance of authenticity within the
tourism field.
A third challenge, and perhaps the
most important, is the continuing need
to
apply authenticity
to sites understood
as wholes, rather than just to
fragments
of the sites. This need responds to our
ever-expanding views of what consti
tutes cultural heritage and the growing
challenge towork within systemic,
holistic, and integrated frameworks in
managing cultural heritage. These
emerging frameworks integrate
concern
for culture and nature, for the big pic
ture offered by a cultural-landscapes
approach, for integrating tangible and
intangible heritage, for linking the living
and the spiritual to the physical, and
finally (in the name of authenticity) for
defining indicators that focus on the big
picture rather than on
fragments of that
reality.
These challenges were already identi
fied in 1999 inGreat Zimbabwe by
Dawson Munjeri, who stated:
that the essence of the notion of authenticity is
culturally relative. In traditional African soci
eties, it is not based on the cult of physical
objects ("the tangible") and certainly not on
condition and aesthetic values. In these societies,
the interplay of sociological and religious forces
has an upper hand in shaping the notion of
authenticity.36
Munjeri further referred to the concept
of integrity, which emphasizes "whole
ness, virtuosity, unfettered by perceived
organic and inorganic human and non
human intrusions." In addressing the
implications of the issue of integrity for
cultural landscapes, Munjeri wrote:
How can such integrity be recognisable when
there are no boundaries traditionally demarcat
ing the world of the creator from that of human
ity and from that of nature? In the area around
the Great Zimbabwe World Heritage site,
constant problems have arisen when its bound
aries have been asserted and legally enforced
against a surrounding community who have
always known that "Duma harina muganhu"
(the Duma have no boundary). The solution lies
in recognising that indigenous communities are
at heart, "ecosystem people" integrally linked to
the ecosystem they inhabit. They are part of the
integrity equation. It is they who can sanction
utilitarian space and through their systems of
checks and balances are the underwriters of that
integrity. It is in this context that their customs
and beliefs need to be encouraged and rein
forced.37
Munjeri concluded by stating that "in
dealing with the issue of authenticity
and integrity,
one cannot but accept the
powerful influence of the spiritual
realm; all else is incidental."38
Although Munjeri uttered these
words almost a decade ago, they
accu
rately anticipated the complex, multi
faceted world of the authenticity-in
tegrity discussion emerging in theWorld
Heritage domain and beyond. He elo
quently pinpointed the need to define
new, more
holistically-based frame
works for evaluating authenticity and its
companion concept, integrity.
Ko?chiro Matsuura, Director-General
of UNESCO, speaking in 2006 of the
role of UNESCO, stated that "In the
face of the attempts to re-write history
that are
currently at work, I can but
recall in the most emphatic
manner that
it is our moral duty
to
analyze the past
and to pass it on without falsification,
alteration or omission." While Mat
suura was moved to make this statement
in reference to attempts "to call into
question...the reality of the Holocaust or
of any other crime against humanity,"
his words provide a telling and clear
reminder of the relevance of the quest
for authenticity within the contempo
rary development of human society.39
HERB STOVEL is a professor and the Co
ordinator of the Heritage Conservation Pro
gramme, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
He has worked with key Canadian and interna
tional organizations for over 35 years to
promote inter-disciplinary, integrated, and
holistic approaches to heritage conservation.
Along with Raymond Lemaire, he was co
rapporteur during the meeting that resulted in
the Nara Document on Authenticity. Professor
Stovel was president of APT from 1989 to
1991.
Notes
1. Herb Stovel, "Working towards the Nara
Document," inNara Conference on Authentic
ity, Japan 1994, Proceedings (Oslo: UNESCO
Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan, 1995),
xxxiii-xxxvi.
2. Herb Stovel, "Considerations in Framing the
Authenticity Question for Conservation," in
Nara Conference on Authenticity, ed. Knut
Einar Larsen (Trondheim, Norway: Tapir
Publishers, 1995), 393-398. This article de
scribes in some detail the American origins of
theWorld Heritage test of authenticity.
3. "Nara Document on Authenticity," inNara
Conference on Authenticity, xxi-xxv.
4. Natalia Dushkina, "Authenticity: Towards
the Ecology of Culture," inNara Conference
on Authenticity, 310.
5. Herb Stovel, from commentaries included in
Annex 4, The Operational Guidelines for the
Implementation of theWorld Heritage Conven
tion, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, version
prepared by the Advisory Bodies (draft, unpub
lished, March 2003).
6. Patrick W Andrus and Rebecca H. Shrimp
ton, "How to Evaluate the Integrity of a
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ORIGINS AND INFLUENCE OF THE NARA DOCUMENT ON AUTHENTICITY 17
Property," How to Apply the National Register
Criteria for Evaluation Bulletin (13MB), VIII,
Internet version revised 2002, http://www.nps
.gov/history/nr/publications/bulletins/nrbl5/
nrbl5_8.htm.
7. Dushkina, 310.
8. Stovel, from commentaries included in
Annex 4, The Operational Guidelines for the
Implementation of theWorld Heritage Conven
tion.
9. Stovel, "Considerations in Framing the
Authenticity Question for Conservation," 395.
Dr. Connally in a number of personal inter
views with the author preceding the Nara
meeting on authenticity confirmed that in his
view authenticity had to be present in all of the
attributes
?
material, design, workmanship,
setting
?
for a site to be inscribed on the
World Heritage List.
10. Andrus and Shrimpton, "How to Evaluate
the Integrity of a Property."
11. Preamble to the International Charter for
the Conservation and Restoration of Monu
ments and Sites (The Venice Charter). The
Venice Charter was adopted by the Und Inter
national Congress of Architect and Technicians
of Historic Monuments, held inVenice in 1964.
ICOMOS, since its founding in 1965, has acted
as the custodian of the Venice Charter.
12. "Nara Document on
Authenticity,"
xxi-xxv.
13. Guo Zhan, e-mail to the author, March
2007.
14. Many of those who have discussed the
authenticity question with me before and since
Nara have occasionally expressed some bore
dom with the continuing emphasis given the
practical application of authenticity, preferring
the stratospheric flights of fancy that linking
authenticity to identity, memory, and human
existence can sometimes produce. It is impor
tant, however, to remember that the authentic
ity debate, in aWorld Heritage context, began
with the need to examine the adequacy of
assessments about conservation practice in one
country, Japan.
15. Jukka Jokilehto, "Treatment and Authen
ticity," inManagement Guidelines for World
Cultural Heritage Sites, ed. B. Feilden and J.
Jokilehto (Rome: ICCROM-UNESCO
ICOMOS, 1993), 59-75.
16. For five heady months, this definition was
also in the late 2003-early 2004 draft Opera
tional Guidelines before the then-president of
theWorld Heritage Committee was alerted to a
potential Advisory Body coup and pulled the
plug on this radical contribution. An interim
draft version of the Operational Guidelines
worked on by the Advisory Bodies and the
World Heritage Centre fairly intensively from
Nov. 2003 toMarch 2004 advanced treatment
of authenticity beyond that currently found in
the Operational Guidelines of 2005. Stovel,
"Considerations in Framing the Authenticity
Question for Conservation," 393-398.
17. International Charter for the Conservation
and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (The
Venice Charter), preamble.
18. E. A. Connally, personal notes (untitled) on
UNESCO document CC-76/WS/25, reporting
on a meeting ofWorld Heritage Advisory
Bodies and World Heritage Committee repre
sentatives inMorges, Switzerland, 19-20 May
1976, author's files. Connally's notes also
report on the development of integrity in the
American system: Connally also notes that in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, he promoted a
broader concept of integrity than that first
articulated in 1953, which promoted inclusion
of integrity of design and setting in the Ameri
can system.
19. Stefan Tschudi-Madsen, "Principles in
Practice," APT Bulletin 17, no. 3-4 (1985): 17.
20. Ibid., 18.
21. Ibid., 19.
22. Ibid., 19.
23. Jokilehto, "Treatment and Authenticity,"
59.
24. Ibid., 60.
25. Report on the Expert Meeting on Heritage
Canals (Canada, September 1994). 18th session
of theWorld Heritage Committee, Phuket,
Thailand, Dec. 1994.
26. The Declaration of San Antonio, Article 1.
Authenticity and Identity.
27. Galia Saouma-Forero, ed., Authenticity and
Integrity in an African context. Expert meeting,
Great Zimbabwe, 26/29 May, 2000 (Paris:
UNESCO, 2001).
28. Operational Guidelines for the Implementa
tion of theWorld Heritage Convention, Feb.
2005. Para 77. Criterion (vi) is described as
follows: "(vi) be directly or
tangibly associated
with events or
living traditions, with ideas, or
with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of
outstanding universal significance. (The Com
mittee considers that this criterion should
preferably be used in conjunction with other
criteria)."
29. Herb Stovel, "The Riga Charter on Authen
ticity and Historical Reconstruction in Rela
tionship to Cultural Heritage, Riga, Latvia,
October 2000," in Conservation and Manage
ment of Archaeological Sites 4, no. 4 (2001):
241-244.
30. English Heritage, Policy Statement on
Restoration, Reconstruction and Speculative
Recreation of Archaeological Sites including
Ruins, photocopy, author's files.
31. Ibid.
32. Interim draft version of the Operational
Guidelines worked on by the Advisory Bodies
and theWorld Heritage Centre fairly inten
sively from Nov. 2003 toMarch 2004 ad
vanced treatment of authenticity beyond that
currently found in the Operational Guidelines
of 2005. Articles from the Nara Document
were retained within an Annex to the OGs on
authenticity, and the Guidelines themselves
were limited to process-based commentary and
advice to States' Parties on identifying and
evaluating authenticity in preparing nomina
tions and assessing state of conservation.
33. Application for inclusion of a property in
the U.S. World Heritage Tentative List, Na
tional Park Service, photocopy, author's files.
34. Benchmarks and Chapter IV of the Opera
tional Guidelines (Paris, April 2-3, 2007).
WHC-07/31.COM/7.3. 31st Session of the
World Heritage Committee, Christ Church,
New Zealand, June 23-July 2, 2007. See
http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2007/whc07-31
com-73e.doc.
35. The conclusions of the Cambridge meeting
on World Heritage monitoring of 1993, held 14
years earlier, differ from those of the Paris 2007
meeting on benchmarks only inmatters of
detail: "The expert meeting defined systematic
monitoring more precisely as the process of the
continuous repeated observation of the condi
tion^) of the site, the identification of issues
that threaten its conservation and World Heri
tage characteristics and values, the identifica
tion of actions and decisions to be taken, and
the reporting of the findings of monitoring and
the resulting recommendations to the appropri
ate authorities, theWorld Heritage Bureau and
the Committee and the cultural and scientific
communities." See whc-93-conf002-4e[l].pdf.
Although theWorld Heritage meeting report
does not cover this, most of the papers pre
sented by both cultural- and natural-heritage
experts focused on the clear definition of heri
tage values as the starting point for effective
monitoring, and several, including mine,
looked at the use of the tangible attributes
described in the "qualifying conditions" as a
jumping off ?point for such monitoring activity.
36. Dawson Munjeri, "The Notions of Integ
rity and Authenticity: The Emerging Patterns in
Africa," inAuthenticity and Integrity in an
African context, 18.
37. Ibid., 19.
38. Ibid., 19.
39. Ko?chiro Matsuura, Director-General of
UNESCO, public statement on Dec. 13, 2006.
Press communiqu? available on the UNESCO
Web site, http://portal.unesco.org/en.
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