Sustaining the Underwater Cultural Heritage

Abstract

This chapter aims to study the use of underwater cultural heritage as a tool to reach Goal 14 of the 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development: Life Below Water. The chapter also hopes to serve as a compendium of the different uses of the oceans, exploring some users that the bibliography has failed to acknowledge, highlighting their main interests and tackling contemporary and future challenges that oceans face by framing the field of study for further research on the topic. The chapter aspires to be an epistemic analysis of the underwater cultural heritage field in order to understand its possibilities, nature, sources and limitations inside the UN Agenda. This approach to the topic hopes to foster future collaborations to understand the interactions between these different sea actors in order to promote economic and social growth while preserving the ocean ecosystem, with the use of underwater cultural heritage as a resource. The research presented in this paper is supported by an NRF UID Grant 129662 Ocean Cultures and Heritage. The author, a postdoctoral fellow of the SARCHI Chair Ocean Cultures and Heritage project based in South Africa.