Unseen monuments: Managing Melanesian cultural landscapes

In his introductory address to the United Nations Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s Second Global Strategy Meeting on the Identifi cation of World Heritage Properties, held at Suva, Fiji, in July 1997, archaeologist Atholl Anderson set out some of the defi ning characteristics of the contribution of potential Pacifi c Island properties to World Heritage. In place of the valorization of the monumental common elsewhere, Anderson drew attention to the likely importance in the Pacifi c of living traditions linking the past and present, and of the role of traditional systems of management of cultural heritage. Investment in the construction of largescale monuments, he claimed, is a relatively rare occurrence in the Pacifi c, ‘where prehistory has a relatively shallow time depth, settlement patterns were rural and dispersed and most populations organized to no level beyond chiefdoms’ (Anderson 1997: 1). The principal potential contribution of the Pacifi c to World Heritage, Anderson concluded, ‘lies in the various ways in which [sites] exemplify the lives of people in small-scale communities and the varieties of interaction between people and environment on small, relatively isolated islands in the world’s largest ocean’ (1997: 10).