Palliative Care as Heritage Conservation: A Model for Indigenous Archaeological Sites and Ancestral Landscapes
As a subset of cultural heritage preservation, the stewardship of Indigenous archaeological sites and ancestral landscapes presents a particularly difficult situation to address professionally given the categorically opposed principles of stewardship that often exist between classic heritage conservation theory and traditional indigenous beliefs. In the United States, tribal authorities and public agencies have spent years in discussion guided by federal laws to find suitable solutions of ownership, access, physical intervention, and interpretation.[1] Most, if not all solutions are difficult compromises that strive to honor native cultural preferences for cultural resources while recognizing the legal requirements and power imbalance that exist with decision-making in the public sphere.
As an educator and professional conservator who has worked on many native ancestral sites in the American Southwest and with different federal agencies and tribal authorities, I have rarely been impressed with our results. It is only now as a current patient receiving treatment for cancer that I realize palliative care medicine may hold the key to thinking about a more equitable and ultimately better approach to archaeological (i.e., “ruin “) sites and ancestral landscapes caught amid sometimes competing goals of perpetual physical preservation, native beliefs regarding natural aging processes, and heritage conservation’s new embrace of long-term sustainability.
Palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical care-giving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating or reducing suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses. Here “quality of life” is contextual. It relates to an individual's lived values and to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns. This sounds remarkably similar to the different expectations native and non-native stakeholders hold based on their divergent world views as to how such sites should be viewed and treated.
Non-native views generally assume degradation and deterioration are negative aspects that should not be tolerated, requiring various degrees of repair or replacement. Indigenous belief systems instead embrace and celebrate the transient nature of these places and argue for limited or no action taken.
The key concept here is recognizing the impermanence of these places, like all matter, and their endless physical changes that occur over time. In palliative medicine, the concept of “terminal” affirms a condition from the beginning to be untreatable for full recovery leading to a premature death. So too in the material world, all matter is “terminal” in the sense that entropy will eventually take hold and reduce even the strongest rock to sand and no intervention no matter how clever can cheat the third law of thermodynamics.
In the United States ruins stabilization efforts from the earliest beginnings have favored preservation over restoration. However, even measures aimed at retaining a place’s “as found” condition (i.e., preservation) utilized materials and methods that often ignored the nature and context of the materials in terms of their natural proclivities towards deterioration and transformation. Foreign materials were introduced to ancient building systems including artificial (Portland) cements, chemical consolidants, and metal and polymer reinforcements to extend and often upend the natural weathering processes. Today conservators better understand the fallibility of such an approach yet at most indigenous archaeological and ancestral sites with standing architectural remains, interventions still often attempt to change the cycle of weathering by radically reducing or altering the weather’s impacts. What if, as palliative care proposes, we could accept the coming transformation and even physical demise of built fabrics and works within those parameters to accommodate, slow or shift change in a way that does not denature the material or its processes of change?
Although I have worked at Wupatki National Monument, a twelfth-century ancestral pueblo in Arizona managed by the National Park Service, with native communities and federal site managers since 2019, I did not recognize my own disciplinary biases in the assumed outcomes until I entered a palliative care program myself (Figure 1). While the vulnerability assessment methods we applied at Wupatki offered measurable observations of potential site vulnerabilities and change, it became increasing obvious as I managed my own devolving physical health, that a perpetually stable state “as found” is unattainable in any dynamic context. Like remedial medicine, long-standing federal policies aimed at preserving physical fabric by preserving physical integrity were neither practical nor even possible in a rapidly unpredictable climatic (and now political) context. Instead approaches based on the concepts of adaptive capacity from climate change studies—looking at ways in which materials and systems can naturally adapt to create new more sustainable forms different from their “as found” condition—in combination with palliative care concepts offer better outcomes that are more in line with native belief systems.
Figure 1. Panoramic view of Wupatki Pueblo. Photograph by F. Matero.
New thinking imposed by climate risk has introduced concepts such as vulnerability, exposure, sensitivity, mitigation, and adaptive capacity for cultural resource management. Discussed below, they set the framework for broader ways of thinking about conservation and management responses that embrace an expanded vision of the dynamic (and now more variable) natural and cultural contexts of these sites. And when coupled with lessons from palliative medicine, they offer a powerful approach to a more equitable stewardship of ancestral and archaeological places.
Risk assessment and management have been applied to the conservation of cultural resources in formal terms at least since the early 1980s and have become a cornerstone of preventive conservation. All heritage conservation, regardless of its focus, employs a range of structural, material, social, and environmental assessments to better understand a resource’s condition and its trajectory over time. While that information is a necessary preface for any intervention, remedial or preventive, it is in the complexity of how that information is recorded, analyzed, and understood that we can best apply the concepts of risk and vulnerability to approach conservation and management of any resource. A greater understanding of risk—the chance of an undesirable change occurring—and the ways to minimize that change (i.e., damage) must first be preceded by establishing vulnerability. According to the IPCC, vulnerability, in the context of climate change, “is the degree to which a system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects … [and] is a function of the character, magnitude, and rate of climate variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity, and its adaptive capacity.”[2]
Until recently, traditions of vulnerability analysis resided in disciplinary silos. Cultural resources have generally followed the research methodologies of the physical sciences and engineering for the analysis of natural hazards on people and places; however, increasing damage and destruction to cultural heritage from civil strife and violence, in association with natural disasters, have forced consideration of political and social structures into the mix. Systems-oriented research and an interdisciplinary and integrative framework for vulnerability are now recognized as necessary to respond to the complexity of threats like global warming. Climate change represents a classic multi-scale, global problem in that it is characterized by infinitely diverse actors, multiple stressors, and multiple time scales. As climate-related disasters become more frequent, more unpredictable, and intensively destructive, we need to rethink our assumptions about even the best responses to past threats. Proactively analyzing and preparing for worst-case scenarios means acting to anticipate disasters that may not happen, and persuading site managers that such caution is worth the cost. By considering diverse sources of quantitative and qualitative data and at multiple scales, it is possible to assess the drivers of vulnerability and in so doing, identify the most important variables in a causal chain of vulnerability to a specific set of stressors.
So how can vulnerability be measured and what are the metrics for built heritage? At Wupatki, site vulnerabilities were identified using standard, albeit modified condition surveys that ranked standing architecture and landscape features according to their physical risk to damage now and in the future. These high-priority areas were then considered for possible conservation interventions set within the prescriptive requirements of achieving “quality of life” of the architecture and setting and adaptive capacity, assuming some form of proactive stewardship was a an agreed upon desirable outcome. Today as incomplete architectural systems fragmented and open to the weather, the architectural remains of Wupatki are at risk to several hazards including water and wind erosion and seismic activity leading to collapse that have been catastrophic (Figure 2). Methods to stabilize them began with the first excavations in the 1930s and have continued ever since with the goal today to keep the “status quo” of the existing ruins. This means retaining the current form of the walls and their disposition to each other after excavation (Figure 3). In some areas this is proving difficult as foundational ledge rock and boulders are shifting geologically, causing the walls precipitously built upon them to shift and move out of plane, resulting in joint separation and in some cases wall-cracking. Other more ubiquitous conditions such as eroding stone masonry joints from wind and water require a constant replacement of surface mortar to protect the exposed walls from water entry that could lead to eventual destabilization and collapse.
“What if, as palliative care proposes, we could accept the coming transformation and even physical demise of built fabrics and works to accommodate, slow, or shift change in a way that does not denature the material or its processes of change and by extension, its inherent nature?”
Figure 2. Wupatki Pueblo, South Unit. Photography by F. Matero.
Figure 3. Wupatki Pueblo 1933-34. Source: WACC; Wupatki National Monument Ruins Stabilization and Archeology 1933-1979 Collection (WUPA CAT 10528; WUPA ACC-00033).
Addressing these conditions since its excavation in the 1930s has created a mythical “as found” condition that exists to this day. But the situation naturally remains dynamic: bedrock and boulders move, exposed joints weather, and wall tops and floors erode. This requires selective cyclical replacement, generally with like materials of soil and stone. Over the years materials and systems foreign to the original construction and selected based on durability biases have been introduced such as cement and polymer amendments to the soil mortars, inserted metal reinforcements to stabilize moving walls and drainage systems. These efforts were made to reduce the labor needed to maintain the existing form and materials already explained as satisfying contemporary federal site preservation policies that have long defined the interpretation of the monument.
Fortunately, recent tribal consultation is moving site managers to reconsider the use of synthetic (non-natural) materials, relying only on those materials found in nature or processes that are totally reversible if applied for temporary support or environmental mitigation such as vegetation removal. While this addresses certain requested approaches held acceptable by affiliated tribal communities, it does not recognize the larger issue squarely confronted by palliative care medicine: that no intervention will cure the problem, in this case of fragmented structures open to an increasingly intensive environment. Instead, we should fix on the dynamics of these natural changes that define the situation and work with them in a culturally sensitive manner.
From a climate science perspective, adaptive capacity recognizes the ability of a system to modify in order to accommodate change. If site preservation methods can identify various mechanisms of modification that work towards greater stability from within rather than outside the natural order or existing system, then greater agreement can probably be reached on culturally sensitive issues of intervention not to mention a more environmentally sensitive and sustainable response to the greater context at hand. This needs of course to be measured against the practical realities of time and cost of site management.
In conclusion, lessons from palliative care do not offer solutions to all archaeological and ancestral site problems, but they do shift the thinking to consider a site or system’s inherent vulnerabilities as opportunities to explore finding more culturally acceptable and environmentally sustainable solutions to these complex problems of indigenous heritage site management.
Citation
Frank G. Matero, “Palliative Care as Heritage Conservation: A Model for Indigenous Archaeological Sites and Ancestral Landscapes,” PLATFORM, July 28, 2025.
Notes
[1] The two most relevant federal policies requiring consultation are the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) of 1978, a US law that protects the rights of Native Americans to believe, express, and practice their traditional religions. Specifically, it ensures access to sacred sites, the use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through traditional ceremonies. While primarily a policy statement, AIRFA is intended to ensure that Native Americans have First Amendment protections for their religious practices. The second and more significant is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) enacted in 1990 to protect and return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony held by federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding. The law requires these institutions to inventory these items, identify their cultural affiliation, and consult with affected tribes and organizations to facilitate repatriation.
[2] James J. McCarthy and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), eds., Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Contribution of Working Group II to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6.
