Tangible cultural resources include, but are not limited to, sites, structures, districts, landscapes, objects, and historic documents associated with or representative of peoples, cultures, and human activities and events, either in the present or in the past. Such cultural aspects are ethnographically documented for the Sioux in relation to the Black Hills, the Navajo and Rainbow Bridge, resources used by the Miccosukee within Big Cypress Preserve, and resources used by Eskimo and native Hawaiian peoples in Alaskan and Hawaiian parks. Intangible cultural resources include the primary written and verbal data for interpreting and understanding those tangible resources. Intangible cultural features including family life, myth, folklore, ideology, folk song, and folk dance are renewable and transmitted from generation to generation. Although material evidence of past cultures is finite, cultural resources in general are not, but are produced by each successive generation.
Most cultural resources are unique and nonrenewable.
These cultural resources were created or occurred at specific geographic locations at certain points in time by different individuals. Although cultural resources fall into broad patterns of civilization, the circumstances that created each resource are unique and thus cannot be duplicated. Because the path of human history continues, new cultural features are created daily, and only time will provide the context for evaluating the relative significance of these new features. Ecological sustainability and preservation of cultural resources are complementary. In large part, the historic events and cultural values that are commemorated were shaped by humankind's response to the environment.