Integrated Management of Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage in the Context of the UN Ocean Decade
The UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-30 provides an opportunity to promote and enable a truly interdisciplinary approach to marine sciences. The Ocean Decade initiative also provides an opportunity to ensure that cultural heritage can be better integrated into broader marine management frameworks. But how will these opportunities be fully realised? How can maritime archaeologists and cultural heritage managers, in theory and practice, enact genuinely integrated – natural and cultural – marine resource management? This session will serve as a forum to discuss our experiences, reflecting upon practical actions and outlining priorities for our field’s contributions to realising the Ocean Decade’s Objectives and Outcomes.
We invite papers that focus on specific examples of projects and plans with strong maritime and underwater cultural heritage components that have integrated management approaches.
As a point of departure, we ask: What specific integrated approaches have these projects/plans applied? What are the capacity building and resource mobilisation efforts and communications and engagement strategies? Are there relationships/frameworks for cultural heritage within the Marine Protected Areas and Integrated Coastal Zone Management initiatives within the country/region? What are the challenges to engaging more constructively with the marine sciences? What recommendations could be made for future endeavours, regarding policy, administration, and practice?
Session co-chairs, Nicholas Vella (University of Malta) and Chris Monroe (Cornell University) invite submissions for the theme of ‘Phoenician and Punic Seafaring’. Papers may relate to any region from what is a Mediterranean-wide, complex phenomenon touching North Africa, Europe, Southwest Asia, and beyond. We take ‘Phoenician’ to refer to coastal Canaanite populations and their expansion dated ca. 1200 to 600 BCE (with notable related precedents), while ‘Punic’ covers Phoenician expansion that continued in the central and western Mediterranean from around 600 BCE into the Roman Imperial era. Papers may interpret archaeological material and/or textual evidence pertaining to those spatial-temporal phenomena, and we encourage the widest possible engagement with theoretical and methodological approaches to excavation, documentation and interpretation as pertaining to seafaring, ships, shipbuilding, shipboard life, seascapes, harbors, and the land-sea interface. Phoenician and Punic evidence offer unique opportunities for considering post-colonialism, networks, globalism-localism, entanglement, middle grounds, hybridity, liminality, collapse and resilience, technological and economic innovation, foodways, ecological impact, cultic and linguistic diffusion, and more. We look forward to a compelling and informative session that illuminates the impact of Phoenician and Punic seafaring.
Shipwrecks hold a special, almost idiosyncratic place in the archaeological record. ‘ Fine-grained assemblages’ of individual objects (Gibbins 1990), they allow to discern relationships between finds (artefacts and/or structures), in such detail that is hard to achieve at other sites, terrestrial or submerged. The shift from 2D to 3D recording during the last two decades marked a watershed and opened new paths for the documentation of underwater sites, shipwrecks in particular. New technologies have been used extensively for surveying hull remains or reconstructing the original ship (McCarthy et al. 2019). Much less attention has been paid, however, on the cargo, especially in the Mediterranean, where the vast majority of the ancient shipwreck sites are essentially cargo assemblages.
Maritime cultural landscapes
The 2022 session, organised by co-chairs Helen Farr (University of Southampton) and Nicolas Carayon (Ipso Facto, Marseille), aims to further explore current applications of this multi-layered concept without geographical, chronological or disciplinary limits. In addition to traditional maritime archaeologists, we would welcome submissions from other disciplines interested in this field, including historians, anthropologists, geographers and geomorphologists amongst others. Presentations can be focused on theoretical approaches or practical uses, ongoing research or recent results. We look forward to a rich multidisciplinary session exploring how we work with and think about Maritime Cultural Landscapes today.
Since the development of maritime archaeology, numerous efforts have been made on the contribution of maritime iconography to the study of ships and other aspects of the maritime world. Indeed, many scholars utilise iconography, alongside textual evidence, to supplement the archaeological record. Especially when the evidence from ship-archaeology are very poor for parts of the vessels, such as the rigging, the superstructures and the upper parts of the hull. However, the study of iconography has its limitations including artistic license and the medium for representation as this often distorts the perspective of the imagery. Despite such shortcomings, maritime iconography - whether ancient or historical - provides an extremely important body of evidence for a number of sub-disciplines including nautical archaeology, maritime traditions and beliefs as well as the field of conservation and heritage management. The depictions from iconography should be compared and verified with other sources (like archaeological or textual) in order to be considered as strong evidence. This interdisciplinary study of iconography could offer fruitful conclusions for the visualisation of the maritime past.
For this session, we are soliciting papers that cover a variety of aspects. These include but are not limited to:
1. The conservation of maritime imagery in situ;
2. Communicating the Visual Past (projects aimed at taking maritime iconography to the public;
3. Newly discovered/studied bodies of evidence;
4. Theoretical/methodological approaches for the interpretation and study of maritime iconography.
5. Interdisciplinary study of iconography together with other sources of evidence.
An oral presentation is planned, and participants will have the option to produce a short web report. A printed booklet of abstracts for all Report Sessions will be provided to conference participants, and a PDF version will be made available to the wider public.
History of the discipline
The study of the history of the discipline is pivotal in providing an understanding of the intellectual, institutional and professional structures of maritime archaeological practice. The overall objective of this session is to critically, reflectively and inclusively start to build an understanding of the history of the discipline of maritime archaeology. It aims to explore the physical and oral record of how maritime archaeological knowledge was generated, including the study of personal archives, notebooks, photographs, newspaper clippings and dive logbooks, as well as interviews and oral histories. Abstracts are encouraged from a range of themes including methodological approaches, exploring individual archives, mapping out aspirational research programmes, to the theoretical approaches and overall objectives of reflectively exploring the development of our discipline. This session aims to determine a framework for future research and build an understanding of archives before they are lost to scholarship and, whilst we are able, to share regional perspectives and experiences with pioneering colleagues and early practitioners of maritime archaeological research.
An oral presentation is planned, and participants will have the option to produce a short web report. A printed booklet of abstracts for all Report Sessions will be provided to conference participants, and a PDF version will be made available to the wider public.
Post-depositional features, distribution of artefacts, cargos and rigging offer significant indications for the interpretation of shipwreck assemblages. Together with the meticulous record and study of ship remains, such evidence leads the final reconstruction of the date, shape, structure, tonnage and function of the ship. Comparison with other sources (iconography, written sources) could also be particularly informative. These sources enlighten aspects of shipbuilding that rarely would be investigated through shipwreck assemblages. The development of interdisciplinarity, connecting nautical archaeologists and other scientists, opened new perspectives in the study of ancient ships. The session will investigate all these aspects, trying to perceive developments and transfers in ship construction, through regional traditions, in the context of specific economic, political, and social factors.
The Report Session Science from the Deep aspires to bring together specialists that work on ancient Mediterranean “deep” shipwrecks to discuss new methodological and interpretative approaches as well as recording methods, with an emphasis on the new technologies applied to the discovery and methodological approach to the study of these particular sites. An emphasis is being placed on the contribution of new, exclusive and often exceptional data from deep wrecks and the new horizons they open up for archaeological research.
We can speak of "deep wrecks" for any site that is more than 50 metres deep, i.e. beyond the legal limit for traditional SCUBA diving with compressed air. Every type of approach is taken into account: from the use of gaseous mixtures to saturation, to the use of ROVs, AUVs or submarines, to all the geophysical systems now available to the scientific community (Sonar, multibeam, sub-bottom profile, etc...). In short, any system that gives humans direct or indirect access to the study of the remains from the deep.
