Dr. Hany Hanna, who is the General Director of Conservation for the Helwan, El-Saf and Afteh Sectors of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, delivered a general call for increased levels of attention on a local, national, regional and global scale to the protection and conservation of global heritage. While his talk did not relate to wooden artifacts specifically in any way, it was directly related to the theme of the Annual Meeting as a whole, and since Dr. Hanna specializes in the conservation of wooden objects and has spoken to our group in the past, no doubt he felt WAG was the appropriate venue for his talk this year.
Dr. Hanna began by defining cultural heritage as including both the tangible and intangible. Tangible heritage includes:
- Cultural
- Natural
- Cultural Landscapes
Intangible heritage includes:
- Practical experience
- Knowledge
- Skills
He pointed out that cultural heritage is priceless for humanity as a whole, as well as for nations and groups. It both strengthens identity within groups, as well as respect for and appreciation of other groups. Dr. Hanna discussed the fact that while great strides have been made on a global scale in protecting our global cultural heritage through education, advances in technology, and the development of new facilities and international partnerships, more must be done to protect cultural heritage form man-made and natural threats. In general, he called for more training, more investment in research and education, as well as facilities to carry out this research and training, and more international cooperation and partnerships.
At the same time, Dr. Hanna encouraged self reliance on the part of governments, NGO’s and universities in individual countries. His point seemed to be that while networking, cooperation and partnerships are vital for the preservation of global cultural heritage, local action and raising local public awareness are the most effective means of achieving preservation goals of emergency preparedness and recovery, risk and damage assessment, and reconstruction and restoration.
In general the ideas and approaches outlined by Dr. Hanna are completely in accord with the thinking of the US conservation community. But it was encouraging to hear them being expressed by a colleague from Egypt. Dr Hanna made two points which were somewhat more surprising. He called for what amounts to an international certification program, validated by local governments but defined by professional organizations, which would include measures to protect against malpractice. I for one had not heard this idea suggested before, and I’m not sure US conservators are ready to embrace such an idea, given our recent decision on a US certification program. But it may reflect the different experience of Dr Hanna in the practice of responsible conservation.
Dr. Hanna also called for the integration of cultural heritage and conservation issues with other economic sectors, suggesting that this would aid social and economic development. This seems to me to be essentially the same argument the Anne-Imelda Radice made in her address to the general session. But in discussing this, Dr. Hanna suggested that conservation training needed to be based “on every day life on a wider level”. By this I took him to mean that conservation training needs to be related to and made relevant in the lives of the people living with the cultural heritage the training program is intended to protect. This seems an eminently sensible suggestion, and relates Dr. Hanna’s talk to the next talk in the WAG session by Ton Wilmering, discussing the World Monuments Fund’s new conservation training program in the Forbidden City in Beijing China, which I will discuss in my next blog.
