The multispecies shipwreck

ABSTRACT

In an era of species extinction, ecological destruction and uncertain futures, the separation of nature and culture within conceptualisations of heritage has become increasingly untenable. Although the limitations – and even damage – caused by the separation of these ontological categories is widely accepted within heritage studies, scholarly interventions calling for more connected ontologies are commonly framed within the context of the terrestrial. This article departs from these terra-centric approaches to instead consider the potential of an oceanic imaginary to problematise and even dismantle these dualist categories. With a specific focus on the Belitung, an ancient shipwreck found in Indonesian waters, this paper dwells on the wreck’s submerged interlude between loss and discovery. It considers the impact of this millennia-long extended period underwater in terms of marine ecosystems and more-than-human growth and destruction. By attending to the process by which ship becomes wreck becomes reef, this article thus draws necessary attention to the ways in which wreck becomes heritage, thus offering insights into how values are ascribed to underwater cultural heritage, and how this both perpetuates, and disrupts, the nature-culture binary.

KEYWORDS:

• Shipwrecks
• underwater cultural heritage
• nature-culture
• Belitung
• more-than-human

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the organisers of the ‘Heritage as Claim Making’ workshop in Norway in April 2022, in particular Edyta Roszko from CMI-Chr. Michelsen Institute and Knut Rio from the University of Bergen. It was at this workshop that the idea of a special issue on oceanic geographies was first raised. My deep thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for encouraging me to extend and situate my thinking. I am also grateful to Tim Winter for transoceanic conversations, to Killian Quigley and Sophie Chao for their wrecky and more-than-human insights and to Michael Leadbetter and Cheng Nien Yuan for their feedback on early drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Scholars such as Þóra Pétursdóttir have drawn attention to the limitations of the concept of objects afterlives, which centres humans within the being and becoming of things. Instead, as Pétursdóttir suggests, ‘an alternative truth may rather be that we only incidentally cross paths with them – that we happen to them rather than the other way around’ (Pétursdóttir 2020, 98). Elsewhere, she urges us to ‘take a brief moment to consider that speaking of the afterlife of things makes us central in their becoming and evolving. We become the authors, the axis of their lives’ (Pétursdóttir 2023). Campbell (2023b, 205), meanwhile, embraces nonhuman afterlives as ‘integral to archaeological practice and interpretation’. The concept of the afterlife, then, is used here with due regard for both its limitations and possibilities in a multispecies context.

2. See also other papers in the edited volume by Rich and Campbell (2023b).

3. Although the introduction by UNESCO of a ‘mixed’ world heritage category – for sites that encapsulate both natural and cultural values – sought to address this issue, this initiative has had only limited success in dismantling the nature-culture dichotomy due to the retention rather than the replacement of the natural and cultural heritage categories.

4. Han also draws attention the interventionist and mediating role of technology in virtual shipwreck excavations. As she observes, the effect is one in which nature is subsumed within human history, ‘leaving out the question of the ocean’s dynamism and the more-than-human ecosystems of the ocean bottom’ (Han 2023, 170).

5. Steve Mentz proposes that the act of de-centring the human through ‘subscendence’ – a purposeful reduction of one’s own power – is a way of resisting the lure of the apocalypse (Mentz 2023, 85).

6. Evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis (1991) is credited with introducing the term holobiont, and eco-feminist scholar Donna Haraway (2016) with developing it.

7. Termed ‘plastiglomerates’, these plastic-sediment hybrids are forged in fire rather than water, introducing a new element to, and creating an outcome different from, the concretions that form in the sea (Trinastic 2015).

8. A survey conducted by Indonesian archaeologists in 2010 revealed that the site had been largely destroyed (Sudaryadi 2011).

9. The remaining 7000-odd objects were seized by the Indonesian Government following a dispute with the salvage company, and remain in storage at a warehouse near Jakarta (Pearson 2023).

10. Rich (2021) captures this dynamic in her use of the phrase ‘savior-scholar’ to describe the preservationist and resurrectionist tendencies within scientific circles towards shipwrecks. Also see Cornelius Holtorf (2015) for a discussion on the preservation paradigm in heritage studies, and Caitlin DeSilvey on transience and decay (DeSilvey 2006, 2012). Heritage as a future-focused project is also discussed at length by scholars including Harrison et al. (2020), especially Chapter One, and Pétursdóttir (2020).

11. See Wang et al. (2018) for a fascinating discussion of the heating and softening techniques used to remove concretions from ceramics on China’s Nanhai I shipwreck.

12. From the Ca Mau shipwreck, an 18^th century Chinese ship that sank off the coast of Vietnam.

13. I acknowledge the influence of Harrison et al. (2020) here, in particular their identification of challenges for the future of heritage across four themes: uncertainty, transformation, profusion and diversity. See also European Environment Agency (2023).

14. As swimmers and divers know, an uncertain sense of time is not the only sense affected by being underwater. For a discussion of how the underwater as a medium that affects vision and sound, for example, see Ann Elias (2019) and Melody Jue (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natali Pearson

Natali Pearson researches and teaches at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, the University of Sydney, where she is affiliated with the School of Humanities. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Indonesia. Her first book, Belitung: The Afterlives of a Shipwreck, is published by University of Hawai‘i Press (2023).