Damascus steel is legendary. The beautifully patterned metal, developed centuries ago, became famous for blades of exceptional sharpness, strength, and durability — the weapons were described in historical accounts as capable of slicing through medieval swords without dulling.
Today, you can buy blades that replicate many of Damascus steel’s properties and microstructures. However, the traditional system that once produced authentic Damascus steel was lost by the 18th century. The collapse of apprenticeship networks, the disappearance of specific ore sources, and the rise of cheaper industrial steel all contributed to its decline. For centuries, the precise methods behind its manufacture stumped researchers, and while modern science has clarified how it worked, the original cultural and material ecosystem that sustained it no longer exists.
Authentic Damascus steel production is just one example of how complex skills can vanish when the conditions that support them disappear — but an international effort is underway to prevent others from following suit.
Making the list
Societies have two types of cultural heritage: tangible and intangible. Tangible cultural heritage consists of physical elements, like monuments, artifacts, and historic sites, while intangible cultural heritage consists of intellectual elements, like customs, traditions, and languages.
In 2003, UNESCO — a United Nations agency focused on promoting world peace through international education, science, culture, and communication — adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, an international treaty designed to help preserve intangible cultural heritage. This convention established the List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding (USL) to highlight elements at high risk of dying out.
The 185 state parties that have ratified the convention can nominate elements for inscription on the list. As part of this process, they submit evidence — documents, images, videos, and more — that the living heritage is both important to a community and endangered. They also submit a detailed community-backed plan for safeguarding the heritage over the next four years. A UNESCO committee then meets once a year to review the nominations and update the list.
Fumiko Ohinata, chief of UNESCO’s Living Heritage Entity, told Big Think that simply getting on the USL can be enough to help safeguard a threatened craft or tradition: “When the hammer goes down, the tweet goes out, the communication effort kicks in … Very often I hear that world interest surges, so perhaps more visitors, more inquiries, more collaboration. There is a general sort of movement, positive attention is being put on inscribed elements.”
The fact that UNESCO requires state parties to periodically report their efforts to preserve elements on the list can also help keep them alive. “They must write what they do for the scrutiny of the international community, and that generates yet another type of safeguarding motivation,” says Ohinata.
Perhaps the biggest impact of being on the USL, though, is that it means a state party can request monetary assistance from UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Fund, to which all of the state parties that have ratified the convention contribute. These grants are usually in the six-figure range, says Ohinata, and are used for consultations, awareness-raising, and other safeguarding efforts.
Charting the impact
In 2025, UNESCO added 11 more elements to the USL, bringing the total to 90. It also soft-launched a platform to highlight good safeguarding experiences of communities involved in the list. How groups successfully connected the few remaining masters of a threatened craft with new practitioners is a common feature of the stories on this platform, including the one highlighting Colombia’s efforts to preserve Pasto Varnish.
Pasto Varnish is one craft, but it requires three different types of experts. First, there are the harvesters who hike through the Amazon jungle twice a year to reach the mopa-mopa shrubs that grow wild in southern Colombia. They know which of the plants’ buds are ready for harvesting and how to remove them without damaging the plant.
The harvesters may spend weeks sleeping in makeshift tents near the mopa-mopa shrubs before returning to civilization to sell the buds to master varnishers. These craftspeople know how to transform the mopa-mopa’s resin into thin, colorful sheets they can use to painstakingly decorate objects made by skilled woodworkers.
Pasto Varnish has been a part of Colombian culture for at least 800 years, but a combination of factors, including the breakdown of traditional apprenticeship systems, competition from cheaper industrial substitutes, and limited economic support for new artisans, had it on the brink of extinction in 2020 — with just 10 mopa-mopa harvesters, 11 wood masters, and 36 varnish masters still practicing the craft, Colombia nominated it for inscription in the USL.
UNESCO approved the nomination, as well as Colombia’s request for monetary assistance from the ICH fund, and in late 2024, state officials delivered their required report detailing various efforts to safeguard Pasto Varnish.
One was working with the nonprofit Mundo Espiral Foundation to establish a Pasto Varnish apprenticeship program that paired 55 apprentices with experienced mopa-mopa harvesters, wood masters, and varnish masters. They also created a 100-hour learning-by-doing methodology for Pasto Varnish using cell phone photos and videos provided by masters of the craft. The government-funded entity Artesanías de Colombia, meanwhile, provided business training to Pasto Varnish artisans and helped them market their creations. According to UNESCO, this has helped elevate the status of Pasto Varnish, increasing the amount of money practitioners can earn from the craft and renewing younger generations’ interest in it.
“Very concretely, five years later, we have a much higher number of practitioners feeling good about producing this craft,” says Ohinata.
Keeping knowledge alive
While the future of Pasto Varnish is looking up, being added to the USL is never a guarantee that an element will survive the test of time. Inscription is often followed by a surge of positive attention, but this can be temporary, and preservation requires sustained effort from governments, communities, and younger generations.
Just because interest in an element wanes, though, that doesn’t mean it can’t be revived — especially now that high-quality recordings can be produced to help transmit cultural knowledge to future generations. Had this been possible in the 1800s, perhaps we’d still have a continuous tradition for making Damascus steel, rather than a modern scientific reconstruction of a once-living craft.
Still, nothing can match person-to-person transmission when it comes to keeping intangible cultural heritage alive, according to Ohinata. “It’s about very specific gestures, the atmosphere, the approach, and the attitude — that cannot be replicated by technology and recordings,” she says. “I think technology is very helpful, but it does not replace human interactions.”
By drawing attention to practices at their most fragile moment, the USL is creating space for those interactions — enabling masters to teach and apprentices to learn.
This article The last masters: The international effort to preserve an ancient craft is featured on Big Think.
The post “The last masters: The international effort to preserve an ancient craft” by Kristin Houser was published on 01/29/2026 by bigthink.com