ABSTRACT
Populating the World Heritage List began cautiously and grew at a measured pace until the middle of the 1990s. The creators of the World Heritage Convention envisaged a highly selective list of sites that could meet the demanding threshold of outstanding universal value. Equitable representation of cultural and natural heritage sites is a fundamental premise of the World Heritage Convention. The Convention's evolution could be characterized as the disappearance of the notion of artistic masterpiece, the emergence of an anthropological concept of cultural heritage, the re-interpretation of the concept of authenticity and the articulation of cultural landscapes as the connecting tissue between culture and nature. In the space of one generation, opposition between cultural heritage and natural heritage lost much of its validity. The majority of new proposals for inscription on the World Heritage List continued to originate from the northern hemisphere.
