Mediterranean heritage: ancient marvel, modern millstone

Periodically the journal commissions articles expressing an author's particular viewpoint on topical or theoretical issues. This is the first of such submissions and we welcome similar such articles.

ABSTRACT. The wealth, variety and seaborne accessibility of Mediterranean societies since late prehistory have made the region's cultural heritage the world's most widely acclaimed. But since the fall of the Roman Empire the Mediterranean has been increasingly disadvantaged, its history compromised, its legacy beleaguered. Two millennia of invasion and rapine, religious vendetta, foreign conquest, imperial dominion and colonial subjugation have left Mediterranean peoples with fewer resources and weaker infrastructures than those of transalpine and transatlantic nation-states. The consequences for the care and control of Mediterranean heritage are parlous. That heritage is both the region's self-defining pride and its economic mainstay, yet a crippling burden to protect and maintain, let alone to interpret and celebrate. It is everywhere beset by natural and human attrition. Weathering and erosion, illicit excavation and pillage, tomb robbery and the international antiquities market exact tolls that legal codes and police forces are all but impotent to stem. Recent social and political trends suggest potential remedies for some of these dilemmas.