Landslides and Cultural Heritage—A Review

Abstract

Cultural heritage sites can be affected by landslides, often causing damage to their integrity, value, and accessibility. Several studies worldwide were focused on the assessment of the potential threats that landslides can pose to the preservation of cultural heritage sites. This article aims to review landslide studies at cultural heritage sites worldwide, analyzing the publications’ temporal distribution, selected methods, geographical and climate contexts, and investigated landslide types. We analyzed a database of 331 publications from 2000 to 2023 in study areas distributed across 47 countries, compiled through systematic queries of the Web of Science and Scopus catalogs. The results show an increase in the number of publications from 2012 onwards, with most studies performing landslide susceptibility analyses on cultural heritage sites. The majority of the studies deployed a geomorphological approach address slope instability mechanisms that threaten site integrity, with a significant number of publications presenting model-based, multidisciplinary and engineering geological approaches. Europe, North America, and Asia and the Pacific concentrate the majority of studies, with Italy and China having the highest number of case studies. The threats to cultural heritage sites located in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa are the least studied. Block slides, earth slides, and rock falls are the most studied processes, with fewer studies dealing with other landslide types.