The values of archaeological heritage sites – how to define significance

To streamline land use planning for archaeological cultural heritage and enable predictability of decision-making, the Finnish Heritage Agency launched the ‘Nationally Significant Archaeological Sites’ (VARK) project in 2018. The aim of VARK’s remains selection is to regionally, temporally and thematically prepare a compendium that is as comprehensive as possible that provides as good an overview as possible of the archaeological heritage of Finland. The administrative goal is to prepare a list that the Finnish government can approve as an inventory referred to in the national land use guidelines based on the Land Use and Building Act (132/1999). Similar inventories have previously been conducted on nationally significant built cultural environments (RKY) and nationally valuable landscape areas (VAMA 2021).