Material culture and social inclusion: creation of a sustainable cultural landscape

The primary duty of a museum is to preserve heritage features of outstanding universal value for future generations. Preserving implies studying, understanding, implementing passive and active conservation but also communicating. As a field archaeologist knows, the cultural manifestations of contemporary life in an archaeological landscape are simply the most recently deposited artefacts to be found in the archaeological stratigraphy and can equally be the subject of study. The connections and entangled relations between modern life and ancient artefacts move beyond the mutually exclusive differences. The degree to which humans and things are entangled partly relates to the length of connected but often invisible links that are involved. Duty of a museum, as a research and cultural centre, is to make these links visible, to communicate the value of its collections and thus to create a sustainable cultural landscape. Conducting research on the metahistory of collections as well as giving importance to the reception of 'the ancient' are useful tools to achieve such a goal. Special attention should be given in finding different and engaging ways to communicate scientific results to the public at large.