Sustainable Heritage Governance in Villages Surrounding Large Archaeological Sites: Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration and Spatial Interfaces in Rizhao, China

Sustainable governance of archaeological heritage requires conservation, public interpretation, and locally retained benefits to be considered together. This study develops a theory-informed diagnostic framework for villages surrounding large archaeological sites, using symbiosis as a relational lens alongside heritage governance and community-participation research. Twenty-eight indicators are organized into three separate dimensions: safety control, cultural experience, and community benefits. The framework is applied to Yaowangcheng, Liangchengzhen, and Dantu in Rizhao, China, using questionnaires, interviews, field observations, and documentary evidence. Fixed-scale scores and an equal-weight principal model are compared with entropy weighting as a sensitivity check. Yaowangcheng combines stronger conservation governance and cultural experience with weaker community benefits; Liangchengzhen combines development capacity with limited realized benefits; and Dantu has restricted public-use and community-benefit functions. The ordering of the three cases within each dimension is unchanged under the two weighting schemes. Observed spatial interfaces provide contextual evidence for interpreting these differences, but do not establish causal effects on benefit retention. The contribution is a transparent way to identify governance imbalances and formulate context-specific priorities. With only three cases, transferability concerns the diagnostic procedure rather than the numerical scores, and proposed spatial interventions require further evaluation.