Journal of European Landscapes - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2025

Raili Nugin (PhD) is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Landscape and Culture, Tallinn University. She defended her PhD in 2011 in sociology at Tallinn University, concentrating on identity & memory dynamics amongst the generation born in Estonia in the 1970s. In the last decade, her research interests have revolved around social / spatial inequalities and vulnerabilities, and include rural youth, rural communities, rural mobilities, migration and issues of collective memory. She gave a keynote speech at PECRL 2024 entitled “Mapping the intangible: Geopolitical dynamics in rural borderscapes”.

Visualizations play a role in presenting archaeological heritage to the public. Some archaeologists use them to foster what they call ‘social values’, for instance, the local economy or social cohesion. To most scholars of Heritage Studies, however, this term means the values communities living in the vicinity of particular heritage ascribe to it. In practice, both approaches to ‘social values’ are sometimes combined in a single project. The question is whether this is viable. By conducting 110 interviews we investigated how the values behind two Dutch visualizations of Roman castella relate to those of local residents. We find that members of these communities are primarily interested in the usability of the visualizations, rather than heritage or aesthetics. Provided these preferences are respected, the visualizations do not compromise their values, but may even lead to an appreciation of archaeological remnants.