Earth heritage
Earth heritage comprises the landforms, rocks, fossils, minerals and soils that surround us and the ways that people understand, value, are inspired by and use them.
It underpins the diversity and richness of our landscapes, biodiversity, cultures and economies. And it’s fundamental to much of our understanding of the world, including concepts of nature, evolution, extinction, deep time, climate change and the Anthropocene. The International Centre for Heritage will develop new understandings and interventions that fundamentally reshape academic, public, policy and corporate perception of Earth heritage.
Peatlands don’t just preserve the objects and structures that people made in the past. The peat itself forms an archive of past environments. By analysing the macroscopic and microscopic plant and animal remains we can construct detailed understanding of past environmental change, human response to such change and, in some instances, human impact on their environments.
Dinosaur tracks
Featured project
We’re leading the way in monitoring, protecting and excavating dinosaur tracks across the UK. Working with partners, such as the Natural England and Jurassic Coast Trust, we are comprehensively documenting all of these trace fossils and assessing the scientific and cultural ‘value’ of key sites. This will provide important baseline information for their future protection and regulation, along with exciting opportunities for education and tourism. As well as using innovative digital, field-based approaches to explore how known track sites change over time, we’re also leading excavations of newly-discovered tracks, such as the ‘dinosaur highway’ in Oxfordshire that recently featured on BBC’s Digging for Britain.
Major new footprint discoveries
Peatland heritage
Peatland heritage
Peat provides unparalleled potential for the preservation of ancient organic material, which is typically absent from other archaeological sites. From objects and structures to perfectly preserved human remains, or ‘bog bodies’, these landscapes offer rare and often visceral glances into the lives of ancient peoples.
Professor Henry Chapman and his team work on a range of collaborative projects with different partners and communities. Our research focuses on understanding and communicating the heritage value of peatlands and other wetland landscapes. This could be reconstructing scenes of prehistoric human sacrifice or providing evidence to support current schemes of landscape restoration.
Dinosaur fossils and capacity-building in Morocco
Dinosaur fossils and capacity-building in Morocco
Export of scientifically significant fossils from Morocco is illegal, yet the global trade in priceless Moroccan Earth heritage is thriving.
Our ongoing fieldwork has recovered dinosaur fossils from Middle Jurassic rocks in the Atlas Mountains that have the potential to be the world’s most important collection of their kind. The fieldwork co-led with the Natural History Museum and the Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah (USMBA) in Fez.
By working with USMBA to build local capacity and expertise through training early-career researchers in fossil preparation and building new fossil labs, we hope to protect and minimise the loss of dinosaur fossils through poaching.
Rationalising and improving fossil collecting codes and schemes on the Jurassic Coast
Rationalising and improving fossil collecting codes and schemes on the Jurassic Coast
The Jurassic Coast is the UK’s only natural UNESCO World Heritage Site and a high-profile place for fossil collecting. We’re working with the Coast’s managing bodies and policymakers to rationalise and improve fossil collecting codes and their associated recording schemes to better cope with this huge demand.
We’re also:
- addressing major access issues at odds with World Heritage principles
- improving understanding of and engagement with the codes among key fossil collecting communities
- making the recording schemes more relevant and useful to academic researchers, museum staff and the public.