Authenticity is about what you can trust to be what it purports to be, and cultural heritage is about what evokes the past in a given social con- text. Consequently, authentic cultural heritage is about what you can trust and evokes the past in society. This quality is often assessed by various ways of determining the age of the heritage in question. But dating does not sufficiently take into account the perceptions of the audience. For something to evoke the past in a given social context, it does not have to be old. Instead of focusing on age, we must therefore focus on the perceived quality of being of the past, as it is the presence or absence of this perception that deter- mines whether or not something is trusted to evoke the past in society.