This article challenges the increasing emphasis on digital technologies to enhance encounters with the past in heritage landscapes. Beginning with a memory from childhood, it conceptualises presence as being there and reviews recent approaches in heritage studies that highlight the benefits of embodied experiences in heritage places, including reinforcing feelings of wellbeing and ontological security.
The paper outlines the limitations of high-tech digital heritage tools, particularly the lack of critical perspectives assessing the ethical and methodological challenges of employing them in heritage landscapes. It argues that there is a recurring theme of grasping for presence. Drawing on fieldwork in four heritage sites associated with the Viking Age in Sweden and Germany, the article suggests that a renewed focus on ‘high touch’ will encourage more meaningful, multisensory encounters within the fabric of the heritage landscape.
As our lives become increasingly high-tech, the article returns to the foundational values and motivations of being there in heritage places. It concludes that heritage landscapes serve as important spaces of interaction where past, present, and future imaginaries can be negotiated beyond the reach of the digital world. The article demonstrates that high-touch encounters, where visitors use their own imaginations to envision past, present, and future, reinforce feelings of wellbeing and ontological security.
While high-tech approaches will continue to emerge in heritage landscapes, it is essential to assess and explore how these techniques will affect the way heritage is encountered, performed, and negotiated. The article emphasises the enduring values and benefits that emerge from unique, lived encounters in heritage landscapes. By reassessing the value of being there, entangled within a landscape that tingles the senses, we can face the uncertain future with a stronger sense of meaning, belonging, and continuity.
