TEHIC-Handbook_of_best_practices

4. Mapping the profession of heritage interpreter TEHIC Towards a European Heritage Interpretation Curriculum 48 Mapping the profession of heritage interpreter By Matilde González Méndez Interpretation, far from being a new phenomenon, is one of the oldest practices for cul- tural transference in existence (Uzzell 1989) The state of heritage interpretation in terms of heritage management T here are other definitions of heritage interpretation more canonical and less simplis - tic (such as those discussed in Chapter 2), but for the purposes of this Chapter we have chosen this one by Uzzel (1989) 1 , which I consider to be interpretive, as it captures the nature of heritage interpretation and brings us to the professional space where in- terpreters operate. The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (Dictionary of the Spanish language by the Royal Spanish Academy) defines the verb to transfer (transferir) as: "to pass or carry something from one place to another". According to the Diccionario Panhispánico del Español Jurídico (Legal Spanish Dictionary), knowledge transfer is "the University's mis - sion consisting in making the results of its research activity available to society through different media" . Heritage interpretation goes beyond conveying university knowledge, but if we keep the idea of conveying knowledge and meaning generated by research in order to know and appreciate heritage, this definition is especially useful in order to place heritage interpretation on the map of what we might call the heritage value chain . The heritage value chain has its origin in the so-called "interpretative chain", as de- fined by F. Criado (1996) in an attempt to organise and integrate the various areas of archaeological work, from research to enhancement, in order to establish a model of her- itage management that includes all the fields of archaeological activity, from the production of knowledege to its conveyance. That model organised the various stages of assessment and evaluation of archaeological assets in three stages, examining their original value, their current value, and their potential for present and future use, showing how successive assessment stages were based on the outcome of previous ones. 2 1 Part of his introduction work for the Second World Congress on Heritage Presentation and Interpretation , of which publication he was the editor. 2 González (1999) added some aspects related to revaluation and with Amado et al. (2002) it started to be known as “value chain”.