| The concept of the cultural route, which emerged in the mid-1990s in the context of an expansion of heritage conservation interest from a concern with individual monuments to broad landscapes, is an innovative approach to understanding cultural exchange. Nevertheless, there are many uncertainties surrounding basic concepts and definitions as such much confusion has arisen with regard to conservation implementation, such as questionable property inscription or inadequate protection zones. This study provides a system for investigating cultural route authenticity and introduces assessment results to support decision making on heritage protection planning by delineating different levels of authenticity in cultural route properties and settings.This system reifies cultural route authenticity as spatial layouts and structures of, as well as the functionalities associated with, tangible cultural route elements, including paths, constructions and natural contexts in continuous scales through spatial analyses in the geographical information system (GIS) approach. The investigation firstly replicates movement to locate the routes and then interprets spatial-related historical functionalities of cultural route elements and their spatial performance or influence in order to reveal their authenticity and map degrees of authenticity for such heritage assets. Finally the investigation and assessment results, e.g. those spatially-distributed authenticity levels and heritage authenticity significance are translated into a four categories in cultural route properties, core areas, and two levels of buffer zones, as conservation delimitation to support planning decision making.Cost-surface and visibility analyses are introduced as the basic methodological approach. Cost-surface analysis on the one hand is used to locate movement paths in context integrated topography, land use and magnetism of historical assets and functions, on the other hand, it also creates accumulative cost surface which can be considered as the inventory of spatial influences of cultural route property. Visibility, generally demonstrated by accumulative viewsheds, reveals specific functions like observing, weapon shooting, place identifying, and so on is introduced to make descriptive interpretation on spatial relationship, landscape perception, special control power, and even natural worship or ritual characteristics and integrated in cost-surface model as one of the anisotropic parameters.A case study on the Great Wall of China is implemented in this research. Firstly, as the central frontier in the Ming Dynasty for defending against Mongolian nomadic invasion, it is investigated by replicating the most probable large scale invasion routes and strategic defensive locations. Then the natural context, route and military facilities of the Juyongguan Pass defensive system and their interrelationships are investigated by means of visibility mapping and comparative cost-surface analyses in regional scale. Spatial control of the Badaling Great Wall and Juyongguan Fortress are mapped and reclassified into conservation delimitation for the Fortress.The significance of this study is that it provides a mechanism applicable to cultural route studies and conservation. Meanwhile, the originality of this study consists in the invention of the schematic system and its implementation in mapping and delimiting the spatial distribution of cultural route historical functions to support conservation planning on a scientific basis. |
