Oceans Odyssey 2
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Oceans Odyssey 2

Underwater Heritage Management & Deep-Sea Shipwrecks in the English Channel & Atlantic Ocean

Greg Stemm, Sean A. Kingsley, Sean A. Kingsley

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eBook - ePub

Oceans Odyssey 2

Underwater Heritage Management & Deep-Sea Shipwrecks in the English Channel & Atlantic Ocean

Greg Stemm, Sean A. Kingsley, Sean A. Kingsley

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About This Book

Oceans Odyssey 2 presents the results of the discovery and archaeological survey of ten deep-water wrecks by Odyssey Marine Exploration. In the Western Approaches and western English Channel, a mid-17th century armed merchantman, the guns of Admiral Balchin's Victory (1744), the mid-18th century French privateer La Marquise de Tourny and six German U-boats lost at the end of World War II are examined in depth. From the Atlantic coast of the United States, the Jacksonville 'Blue China' wreck's British ceramics, tobacco pipes and American glass wares bring to life the story of a remarkable East Coast schooner lost in the mid-19th century. These unique sites expand the boundaries of human knowledge, highlighting the great promise of deep-sea wrecks, the technology needed to explore them and the threats from nature and man that these wonders face. Challenges to managing underwater cultural heritage are also discussed, along with proposed solutions for curating and storing collections.

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Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2011
ISBN
9781842176184

1

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Underwater Cultural Heritage & UNESCO in New Orleans: An Introduction

Sean Kingsley
Director, Wreck Watch Int., London, UK

1. Introduction

In the course of the marine archaeology session held at the Underwater Intervention conference in New Orleans on 11 February 2010, a panel discussion was convened to explore the perceived merits and potential pitfalls of UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage 2001 (henceforth the Convention or CPUCH).1
Over the last decade the Convention has attracted major interest, debate and intrigue. Irrespective of which countries have and have not ratified this instrument (27 to date, with a further four going through the acceptance phase),2 it has become a significant fulcrum point for discussing the management of underwater cultural heritage in the early 21st century. There is no reason to expect an abrupt sea change in the next decade.
CPUCH incites extreme opinions and, perhaps unexpectedly amongst scientists, a wide range of emotions. The New Orleans event was no different due to the co-presence of archaeologists, who have witnessed first-hand the wanton pillage of shipwrecks, and commercial archaeologists who argue that the controlled for-profit sale of some ‘trade goods’ (but not unique ‘cultural goods’) is a realistic and robust model for shipwreck archaeology. In the Odyssey Marine Exploration structure this applies particularly to deep-sea sites, where access is prohibitively expensive and technologically challenging for most academic and government entities.
Due to the ‘closure’ of all airports along the northeast coast of America because of a snow blizzard, several panelists were unable to attend the conference. The eight individual contributions in this paper thus unite the opinions of the original panelists, plus a few additional specialists – a diverse and eclectic range of experts, some with overlapping professions, including three archaeologists, three university professors, two lawyers and two businessmen involved in commercial archaeology:
• Prof. Filipe Castro – Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation, Texas A & M University, USA.
• Prof. David Bederman – K.H. Gyr Professor of Private International Law, Emory University School of Law, USA.
• John Kimball – International and Maritime Litigation and ADR Practice Group Leader, Blank Rome, LLC; Adjunct Professor, School of Law, New York University, USA; US delegate to CPUCH.
• Greg Stemm – CEO, Odyssey Marine Exploration, USA, and US delegate to CPUCH.
• James Sinclair – Director, SeaRex Inc., USA.
• Daniel De Narvaez – Naval Historian and Investigator, Colombia.
• Dr Sean Kingsley – Director, Wreck Watch Int., United Kingdom

2. CPUCH Versus Treasure Hunters

UNESCO’s initiation of the Convention in 2001 has been interpreted as a defensive strategy with three goals: to eliminate the undesirable effects of the law of salvage; the exclusion of a ‘first come, first served’ approach to heritage found on the continental shelf; and to strengthen regional cooperation (Scovazzi, 2002: 154). Top of this list is the international community’s concern over advances in deep-sea technology during the last 20 years, causing the Convention to be geared specifically to “provide a detailed legal regime for controlling the activities of treasure hunters in international waters” (Dromgoole, 2006: xxvii).
This remains a central tenet, although reading between the political lines, CPUCH also seems to be a reaction to past generations’ unbridled recovery of artifacts and structural remains. The resource has been perceived as having been exploited without sufficient concern about conservation, storage, curation, display or publication.
The recovery of substantial wooden hull remains may be pinpointed as an additional motivation underlying these newly formalized policies. Behind closed doors there is a general consensus that certainly no European country wants, or can afford, another Mary Rose, despite its enormous educational and touristic benefits. Its titanic expense – some £500,000 every year since 1982 for preserving the timbers, and an extra £35 million for completing the curation of its artifacts and building a dedicated ship museum – still haunts many heritage managerial meetings. The extrapolation that every wreck lifted might turn into another Mary Rose money pit is an inaccurate yet extant perception.
Dr Colin White, a former Director of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich (White, 1994: 180), has argued that ship preservation went wild after 1949, when history was ransacked to provide reasons for preservation as crowd pullers. He proceeded to caution against raising ships with great exuberance: “The fact is that underwater camera and satellite-link technology now exists which renders the tearing of wrecks from their sea-beds as obsolete an operation as the ripping out of infected tonsils.”
Collateral motivations aside, it is the stereotype of uncontrolled, large-scale shipwreck plunder or recovery for the commercial sale of artifacts as the primary objective that united many countries under the CPUCH banner. The extent of the negative reaction to ‘treasure hunting’ has been particularly strongly expressed by Robert Grenier in an ICOMOS publication (Grenier, 2006: x):
“An inventory of all the wrecks who have been subject to excavation or salvage since the invention of the aqualung (autonomous deep-sea diving suit) half a century ago demonstrates that no historic wreck has ever been saved by commercial contractors or treasure hunters; only archaeologists have succeeded in this task. At the very most, treasure hunters have “saved” objects of commercial value at the cost of the destruction of the archaeological context, which is the real danger. These people exploit historic wrecks as if they were mines of precious metals. The countries that compromise with them, attracted by the promise of receiving 10% and even up to 50% of the spoils, in fact, recuperate only a minimal part of the historic value of the wreck, as 90 to 95% of this value is destroyed in most cases. These wreck salvagers are in fact like proverbial wolves guarding the flock. Why not conserve 100% of what belongs to the nation?”
Dr. Grenier assumes an extremist, though far from unique, position. The issue UNESCO faces, and which dominated discussions at the New Orleans conference in February 2010, is the reality that unbridled treasure hunting is simply not considered a legitimate activity by any of the legitimate stakeholders in underwater cultural heritage management. The new breed of commercial marine archaeologist may rely on capital investment, stocks and private investment, and the lure of profit from the sale of select artifacts, but some commercial companies have proven highly proficient at excavating, recording and interpreting shipwrecks.
Today some commercial companies undeniably possess the combined sophistications of technology, personnel and experience to fuse for-profit ventures with science, whereby wreck contexts are respected and recorded and site plans and pottery statistics compiled. Nanhai Marine Archaeology, for instance, has worked closely with the Malaysian government to record and recover elements of ten wrecks dating between the 11th and 19th centuries (Brown and Sjostrand, 2002; Sjostrand, 2007). Artifacts are transparently available for sale, with government sanction. If the site plan of the cedar and pine Desaru wreck’s hull of c. 1830, 34 x 8m, typifies this company’s archaeological capabilities across the board, then their recording exceeds most contract-led projects and equals university standards. The site’s 69,726 ceramic wares have also been comprehensively quantified. Artifacts from the Desaru ship are on display at the Maritime Archaeology Malaysia exhibition at Muzium Negara in Kuala Lumpur.3
The discovery of the Henrietta Marie by the Armada Research Corporation in 1972 on New Ground Reef, 56km west of Key West in Florida, has literally opened a new chapter in understanding the 17th-century triangular slave trade. More importantly, it has become a sociological focus for the West’s modern confrontation of its shameful past. Initially funded through commercial investment for underwater surveys searching for the 1622 Spanish fleet, site research continues to this day. Although the project has been criticized by some scholars because the results have not been principally disseminated through academic papers, but through the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society website (Webster, 2008: 10),4 extensive scientific data has been obtained, ranging from 90 sets of iron shackles to over 300 English pewter wares, 11,000 trade beads, six elephant tusks and 28 examples of ‘voyage-iron’ bars. These are now recognized as ‘signature assemblages’ of the slave trade (Moore and Malcom, 2008).
Finally, the commercial archaeology company Odyssey Marine Exploration is recording deep-sea wrecks (spatially accurate photomosaics, site plans, descriptions of contexts, artifact catalogues) to standards that facilitate detailed historical interpretations of sites. The survey work on the wreck of HMS Victory, lost in the English Channel in 1744 (Cunningham Dobson and Kingsley, 2010), and the excavation of site E-82, the possible wreck of HMS Sussex in the Straits of Gibraltar, reveal that such organizations match, and in cases exceed, standards set on shallow-water sites. The environmental and marine biological non-intrusive work on site E-82, in particular, coupled with contextual recording, has set new standards for deep-sea shipwreck archaeology (Cunningham Dobson et al., 2010).
This careful and concerned approach to underwater cultural heritage is a world apart from the hit and run image depicted above by Robert Grenier, although it must be acknowledged that standards are far from uniform across the entire commercial marine archaeology field. In light of the above new brand of commercial marine archaeology, a significant element of the debate in New Orleans centered around defining the ethical fine line between science and commerce. Many panelists and members of the audience felt that UNESCO has failed to recognize and encourage debate of this new world order.

3. Crossing the Lexicon

Anybody with a passion for the sea and its submerged archaeological heritage should support the basic premise of the UNESCO Convention of striving to shore up protection and dissemination of knowledge about our shared past. Profound differences in philosophy surround the Convention, but at its core it has the potential to serve society in the right spirit by promoting the existence and perilous condition of underwater cultural heritage. The protocol unites a collage of ideas and ideals that have been debated and applied for decades. Almost all of the initiatives have a long track record of being tried and tested. Without wishing to be even remotely comprehensive, these include inter-regional cooperation, the creation of marine parks for controlled public access and outreach, sanctions, public outreach, personnel training, the formulation of project plans and the establishment of appropriate centralized authorities.
Publications and discussions, as aired in New Orleans in February 2010, are making it increasingly clear that a rift exists, however, between the objectives of the Convention, as UNESCO intends it to be utilized, and its interpretation within the scientific and cultural heritage community. A problem of language, rationale and meaning exists, particularly in regard to the following ambiguous points (excluding areas of fundamental philosophical differences):
1. Who is CPUCH designed for: government heritage organizations and contract archaeology companies or also university-led projects?
2. The concept of in situ preservation (Article 2.5; Annex Rule 1) has assumed the status of a sacred cow in many circles and elicits strong reactions. Again, for whom is this conceived? To mentor countries with fledgling marine archaeology units or also sophisticated organizations with a track record of successfully organizing and publishing major excavations, such as NOAA, English Heritage, DRASSM and the Israel Antiquities Authority? Are major universities that have pursued research-led projects for decades and contribute to the writing of long-term history expected to adhere to in situ protocols, such as the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Texas A&M University; the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, University of Haifa; the Centre for Maritime Archaeology, Southampton University; or the Centre for Maritime Archaeology, University of Oxford, to name but a few.
3. How is the encour...

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