Landmarks Foundation, founded in 1997 by Samuel Adams Green and based in New York City, was a non-profit organization created to conserve sacred sites and landscapes around the world. The foundation motto was "protecting sacred sites globally." [1]
Samuel Adams Green was an American art curator and director, most associated with his promotion of American pop art, particularly the early works of his friend Andy Warhol.
The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Historic preservation (US), heritage preservation or heritage conservation (UK), is an endeavour that seeks to preserve, conserve and protect buildings, objects, landscapes or other artifacts of historical significance. This term refers specifically to the preservation of the built environment, and not to preservation of, for example, primeval forests or wilderness.
The following defines what the Landmarks Foundation was founded to ward and why:
Whether locations are in current use today or relics left by vanished ancestors, these sacred places are tangible and sometimes intangible focal points for the beliefs, rituals and religions that define human societies. These structures and integral natural settings are threatened by economic expansion, desecration, pollution and neglect as well as by natural disasters and erosion. Just like the natural world, mankind's spiritual heritage is in need of dedicated protection. [1]
A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized but not defined by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.
Religion is a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. However, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.
Desecration is the act of depriving something of its sacred character, or the disrespectful, contemptuous, or destructive treatment of that which is held to be sacred or holy by a group or individual.
The Landmarks Foundation directs funding and technical expertise to local groups that cannot protect their sacred cultural heritage without assistance. Selection of specific projects is based on cultural significance and degree of jeopardy. In describing their methods, a spokesperson for Landmarks Foundation remarked that "Piecemeal restoration is no substitute for a master plan...". [1] [2]
Sites to which the Landmarks Foundation has lent its efforts towards protecting include the following: [3] [4]
- the stone spheres of Costa Rica
- the Moai of Easter Island
- the Kaleshwar Temple Complex in India
- the Misión Santa Catarina Virgen y Mártir and Huichol sacred sites in Mexico
- the ruined city of Ani and the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Lake Van in Turkey
- the Sajama Lines of Bolivia
The stone spheresof Costa Rica are an assortment of over three hundred petrospheres in Costa Rica, located on the Diquís Delta and on Isla del Caño. Locally, they are known as Las Bolas. The spheres are commonly attributed to the extinct Diquis culture and are sometimes referred to as the Diquís Spheres. They are the best-known stone sculptures of the Isthmo-Colombian area. They are thought to have been placed in lines along the approach to the houses of chiefs, but their exact significance remains uncertain.
Moai, or mo‘ai, are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island's perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads three-eighths the size of the whole statue. The moai are chiefly the living faces of deified ancestors. The statues still gazed inland across their clan lands when Europeans first visited the island in 1722, but all of them had fallen by the latter part of the 19th century.
Easter Island is a Chilean island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. Easter Island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people. In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with much of the island protected within Rapa Nui National Park.
The Landmarks Foundation relied upon donations for its funding. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Robert de Rothschild, Princess Elizabeth, and Mesrob II are among its members and supporters. The Landmarks Foundation's advisory board was a multi-national assembly of conservation experts from around the world. [5]
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is an American activist, environmental attorney, and author. Kennedy serves as president of the board of Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-profit environmental group that he helped found in 1999.
Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia is a member of the House of Karageorgevich, a human rights activist and a former presidential candidate for Serbia. She is also known as Jelisaveta Karađorđević .
