"Lieux de mémoire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete and sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration. Indeed they are lieux in three senses of the word - material, symbolic, and functional. Even an apparently purely material site, like [a garbage dump], becomes a lieu de mémoire only if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura" (Pierre Nora, Between Memory an History: Les Lieux de Mémoire)