High tech or high touch? Heritage encounters and the power of presence

Abstract

In this article, I challenge the increasing emphasis on digital technologies to enhance encounters with the past in heritage landscapes. Beginning with a memory from my childhood, I conceptualise presence as being there and review recent approaches in heritage studies that highlight the wide range of benefits derived from embodied experiences in heritage places including reinforcing feelings of wellbeing and ontological security. Outlining enduring 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, I argue 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, I suggest 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, I return to the foundational values and motivations of being there in heritage places, concluding 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.