ABSTRACT
‘Dark heritage’ are legacies whose origin is often unwanted, dissonant, uncomfortable, and contested, and are often associated with sites and landscapes as people go through the processes of grieving, questioning, understanding, and (un)acceptance of a traumatic event, be it occurring from a human (e.g., genocide) or natural hazard (e.g., earthquake) phenomenon. Dark tourism, turns visiting and often capitalising, these dark heritage spaces into a tourist experience. By placing hazard at its centre, this chapter explores the heritage values associated with the land, covering the role of tourism, agriculture, livelihoods, and memory. We address themes such as cyclicity, (in)frequency, trauma, and how high-magnitude events impact a given society's relationship to its heritage, education, and emotional salience. The land and hazards are examined in the context of dark heritage, focusing on the role of destruction in both the built environment and the natural landscape. In the concluding section, we discuss traumatic heritage and approaches to it, trauma without death, and take-away lessons on dark heritage and disaster risk management. Based on the expertise of the authors, many of our examples revolve around volcanic eruptions, and our thinking touches on discussions occurring in the geosciences, archaeology, and anthropology, but we find that these examples and disciplinary perspectives have relevance for a broader range of natural hazards and heritage landscapes.
