Paper short abstract:

The paper seeks to better understand the ascendancy of science based knowledge practices in international heritage conservation through a focus on the 1950s; a moment where rapid geopolitical change and re-configuration created important foundations for the remaining decades of the twentieth century.

Paper long abstract:

The 1950s was extraordinarily formative to our contemporary modes of international cooperation for conservation and heritage governance. The search for peace after World War II, the rapid proliferation of nation-states via decolonisation, together with the newly emergent polarities of the Cold War, created a highly complex network of institutions and programmes dedicated to both conserving the cultural past, and using it as a mechanism for peace and inter-national, inter-regional dialogue.

It is now widely asserted that within this period the internationalisation of conservation and heritage governance involved the consolidation of science based knowledge practices. Wallerstein, for example, has accounted for the hegemony of science as an essential prerequisite for the ongoing functioning of the modern world-system in the aftermath of European empire. For Escobar, scientific knowledge provided the platform for tying international cooperation to ideals of social progress and development. Such broad-based explanations have, however, swept under the carpet the details, paradoxes, and unexpected contradictions of this critical period. This paper seeks to excavate more closely the ways in which experts in archaeology, epigraphy, architectural conservation and chemistry came to be entangled in complex, and often surprising, geographies of international aid via institutions that formed around a fast-paced geopolitics and its itinerant strands of diplomacy.