Cultural heritage is usually taken to mean the sites, movable and immovable artifacts, practices, knowledge items, and other things that a group or society has identified as old, important, and therefore worthy of conscious conservation measures, often at the hands of specialized institutions. This invariably comprises only a selection of the total cultural repertory, much of which may not be perceived with similar consciousness. Such a use of ‘heritage’ is a relatively recent extension of the original lexical meaning of individual heirloom to a collective level.