DOI: 10.4324/9781003293019-20 ‘Dark Heritage’ Landscape, Hazard, and Heritage Jazmin Scarlett, Miriam Rothenberg, Felix Riede, and Karen Holmberg What Is Dark Heritage? The presentation and representation of death, dying, and the dead are prominent facets of human cultures (Roberts & Stone, 2014). The study of tragedies, disasters, catastrophes, and calamities – and their tangible and intangible legacies – has been termed ‘dark heritage’. Heritage refers to practices, things, and places that are passed down between generations and viewed as having value worth being perpetuated and/or preserved. Heritage can be either tangible (physical) or intangible (ideational) and can include traditions, objects, monuments, language, landscapes, music, and more. The label ‘dark heritage’ is applied to legacies of this kind whose origin is often unwanted, dissonant, uncomfortable, and contested. It often adheres to sites and land- scapes as people go through the processes of grieving, questioning, understanding, and (un) acceptance. Iconic locales of dark heritage include prisons, concentration camps, battlefields, and crash sites. Academic interest in dark heritage arose out of the field of dark tourism studies in the 1990s and 2000s (e.g., Lennon & Foley, 2000; Sharpley, 2009) and the two fields have remained closely linked. This is because, although acutely traumatic to those impacted by the precipitat- ing tragedy, sites of dark heritage are also often alluring and many have become popular tourism destinations (Hooper & Lennon, 2017). Often referred to as ‘dark sites’, locations of dark herit- age include those related to conflict, violence, genocide, tragedy, incarceration, and disaster. It is well recognised that they are continuously constructed and reconstructed into ‘meaningful’ places (Sather-Wagstaff, 2011). From the perspective of tourism studies, dark heritage has thus been defined as a means of acknowledging dark sites and their connection to atrocity as places of remembrance, education, or entertainment (Foley & Lennon, 1996). Dark tourism research has focused on the experiences of visitors, researcher reflections upon visiting dark sites, and the perspectives of communities living in proximity to dark tourism destinations (e.g., Dunkley, 2017; Knudsen, 2017; Kulcsár & Simon, 2015; Strange & Kempa, 2003). The literature overwhelmingly describes sites of tragedies that are entirely human- induced – locations of genocide or battle, abandoned prisons and gulags, sites of murder and assassination, and sites associated with the Atlantic Slave Trade such as plantations and ship- ping ports (Hooper & Lennon, 2017). The continuing influence of dark tourism studies on dark heritage studies, while stimulating research in the latter field, has created a number of gaps and biases as to what comprises dark heritage and how it is understood. This chapter explores three overlapping facets of dark heritage that have received thus far only limited attention: dark herit- age created by natural hazards, dark landscapes, and the value or importance of dark heritage beyond tourism. 16