Neil Silberman

Neil Silberman is an author and heritage scholar with a special interest in the politics and impact of heritage on contemporary society. He served for a decade as the founding president of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Interpretation and Presentation (ICIP). In that position he served as chief editor of the 2008 ICOMOS Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites. From 2004 to 2007, he served as director of the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation in Belgium. He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute of Current World Affairs.

In 2015, he was named a Fellow of US/ICOMOS. In 2008, he joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and became one of the founders of its Center for Heritage and Society. He also served as co-editor of its journal Heritage & Society (2008-2014) and is currently a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Cultural Property and the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies.

His books and edited volumes on Heritage, Archaeology, and their impact on contemporary society include: The Oxford Companion to Archaeology (2012); The Future of Heritage (2008); Who Owns the Past? (2007); Memory and Identity (2007); and Heritage, New Technologies, and Local Development (2006). He is now a managing partner of Coherit Associates, an international heritage consultancy, and is co-editor with Dr. Angela Labrador of The Oxford Handbook of Public Heritage Method and Theory (2018). Trained in archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he has also published widely on the history of Israeli archaeology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the archaeology of the Bible. He is co-author with Prof. Israel Finkelstein of The Bible Unearthed (2001). From 2013 to 2020, his firm, Coherit Associates, implemented a 14-nation Caribbean heritage development project for the Organization of American States (OAS).