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

Introduction

A ship sails, it fails, and, after centuries or even millennia, it is found. To discover – whether by chance or intent – a wreck and pull it from the ocean is to ascribe it value, to socialise it within human worlds, and to transform it from ruin to heritage. But what of the intervening years, between its sinking and its discovery? How does this in-between period unsettle the artificial binaries between natural and cultural heritage, and between marine and maritime dimensions of heritage? Might the generative nature of this watery interlude produce not only marine ecosystems but also new ways of conceptualising heritage?

To address these questions, this article takes as its case study the ninth century Belitung shipwreck. In its first life, this was a seafaring vessel that transported vast quantities of Chinese ceramics across the ocean. It sank approximately two nautical miles from what is now known as Belitung Island, in what would become Indonesian territorial waters, at a depth of less than 20 metres. The cause of the wrecking remains unknown but can probably be attributed to some combination of poor weather and nearby reef (Flecker 2000). Thus began the first of the Belitung’s ‘afterlives’, the vessel and its contents ‘submerged and hidden beneath the water’ for more than a thousand years (Pearson 2023, 2).¹ Over a millennium would pass before the vessel was discovered by local fishers, who described a reef from which ceramics appeared to be growing.

This case study was selected not only for its ‘flat’ ontological potential (Rich and Campbell 2023), the theoretical specifics of which I will turn to shortly, but because of the abundance of scholarship on this particular wreck (Chong and Murphy 2017; Heng 2019; Pearson 2023; Krahl, Guy, and Raby 2010) – none of which, however, addresses the period between the vessel’s loss sometime in the ninth century and its discovery and salvage in the late twentieth century. Having become wreck, how did the Belitung become reef – and what else did it become? As I will propose, attending to the 11 centuries this vessel spent submerged can offer new insights into how heritage is created, whilst also demonstrating the value of an oceanic imaginary in developing the conceptual possibilities of critical heritage studies as a field of research.

In doing so, this article responds to the recent ‘call to action’ by Sara A. Rich and Peter B. Campbell for maritime archaeologists to more explicitly mobilise and respond to the crises of the Anthropocene by engaging with an object-oriented theoretical framework, or ‘flat ontology’, that seeks to collapse hierarchies between humans and objects (2023, 37).² As they explain, flat ontologies recognise ‘that discrete objects are just as real as the subjects thinking them’; as researchers of the ocean and as humans in the Anthropocene, we can no longer maintain the false privilege that ‘members of our species are the only “subjects” possessing agency’ (Rich and Campbell 2023, 37).

To launch the journey, as it were, I want to begin by drawing attention to three intertwined issues that have influenced shipwreck thinking to date. Unchallenged, these issues will continue to inform how we think about shipwrecks in the future, and thus, I contend, represent an important point of departure for developing a more critical perspective on maritime heritage generally, and shipwrecks in particular.

The first such issue is the harm caused by conceiving nature and culture as separate. In an era of species extinction, ecological destruction and precarious futures, the destructive legacy of the nature-culture bifurcation has become increasingly untenable.³ For several decades, and with added momentum due to the climate emergency, heritage scholars have rejected as ‘artificial’ the distinction between natural and cultural heritage (Harrison 2015, 24). This bifurcation is indelibly connected to the Anthropocene, which has privileged that which is human and demanded ‘disregard of all things regarded as nonhuman’ (Rich and Campbell 2023, 41), thus creating the conditions for the colliding catastrophes of the current era. Instead, there is a recognition that this separation needs to be dismantled, through what Rich (2021, 25) describes as a ‘resetting [of] the binary bones’.

But to re-set these binary bones, critical heritage scholars must move beyond the land and look instead towards the possibilities of the maritime domain. This brings us to the second issue: the persistent terra-centrism of heritage studies. Admittedly, there has been some recent progress in this regard, as scholars experiment with using shipwrecks as an empirical basis for further theorisation (Rich 2021; Rich and; Campbell 2023; Pearson 2023). On the whole, however, critical heritage scholars have focused on land-based sites as the basis for theoretical innovation. Harrison et al. (2020), for example, mount a convincing future-focused argument that heritage is ‘a series of activities that are intimately concerned with assembling, building and designing future worlds’ (Harrison et al. 2020, 4). Elsewhere, scholarship on difficult heritage has found resonance in wider discourses around conflict, the politics of heritage, legacies of colonialism, and the rising tide of nationalism in Asia and around the world (Huang, Kyung Lee, and Vickers 2022; Logan and Reeves 2009). But these scholarly interventions have largely overlooked the maritime, despite the theoretical possibilities it presents (Campbell 2023a).

Instead – and bringing us to the third issue – shipwreck thinking has been driven by an intellectual orientation towards the material reality of a wreck and its cargo. This materiality is distinctly unstable, more so if discovered and pulled from its watery environment. Whether they are preserved in situ (as is UNESCO’s preference) or recovered for research and display, wrecks and their contents are distinctly vulnerable to degradation and loss, which is in turn normatively conceptualised as something to be avoided or averted (Holtorf 2015). The perceived inevitability of a shipwreck’s presence becoming, without human intervention, an absence, is further complicated by the question of access, which is far more limited at sea than on land and thus creates an inherent exclusivity in terms of who, from the human world at least, can and cannot visit these sites. The apparent vulnerabilities and access limitations of shipwrecks have given rise to certain domains of expertise in which the conservation imperative is paramount. First maritime archaeologists, and then museum curators, seek to resist the material instability of the wreck through their expert intervention: seabed sediments and shellfish attached to ancient ceramics are softened through heating and boiling, enabling the separation of organism from artefact (Wang et al. 2018); sacrificial anodes are placed on still-submerged iron wrecks to reduce the rate of corrosion (MacLeod 2002); shipwrecked timbers are impregnated with aqueous solutions to prevent drying wood from collapsing (Richards 1990).⁴ Thus cleansed of these traces of the deep, the shipwreck is rendered surveyable and displayable – but in doing so, the nature-culture divide has been reinforced, and the land, and those who live on it, are again prioritised.

What might it look like, then, to broaden shipwreck research beyond anthropocentric and terra-centric perspectives that prioritise cultural heritage, (re)construction and trade? What might we risk – and gain – by stepping away from human-centred approaches and instead observing the shipwreck within the context of all its relationships? An exploration of such themes enables us to reimagine and re-value our connections to the ocean worlds, where environmental histories become part of a new way of thinking about the hyphen in marine-maritime – and indeed nature-culture – heritages, and to move closer to disrupting these artificial delineations (Rich, Hamdan, and Hampel 2023).

To explore this hyphen, then, as a way of venturing towards a further opening up of the field, I begin not with humans and their technologies, but by diving deep into a watery interlude of some 1100 years. Beginning not with the ship but with the wreck is intentional; rather than privileging cultural and historical readings of the ship, my focus is instead directed towards an approach that de-centres humans in both its epistemology and methodology, in the process contributing to the theorisation of flat ontologies for the Anthropocene.⁵

To do so, I draw on a range of disciplines including geography, eco-feminism, marine biology and multispecies ethnography to describe the complex biological, geological and chemical entanglements of time spent underwater. I then look at the process by which this wreck-reef becomes heritage through its re-entry into the social world and the attribution of archaeological value. I conclude by identifying some considerations of thinking with shipwrecks, in particular the oft-overlooked period – by heritage studies scholars at least – between loss and discovery. As I propose, the novel concept of the multispecies shipwreck is one that allows for new oceanic ontologies, predicated as it is on a more-than-human approach that embraces fluidity and flux and resists the preservationist paradigms within both critical heritage studies and the domains of expertise traditionally charged with wrecky thinking.

Becoming reef

The first afterlife of a shipwreck begins the moment a vessel sinks. This event marks the beginning of a transformational process of damage and destruction, and, at the same time, of growth and proliferation. It is the former process that is most readily associated with a shipwreck. Not only are lives and fortunes lost when a ship sinks, but the vessel itself, and any cargo it is carrying, are ‘subject to attack’ by marine life, seawater, wave action and more; a process of physico-chemical, biological and geological ‘degradation’ begins (Memet 2008, 42). But this is also a generative process: in the right conditions, wrecks can become home to coral and critters remarkably quickly. Some marine organisms, such as algae, settle on exposed timber, stone or metal within hours. In the longer term, more complex ecosystems flourish; oysters encrust ceramics scattered on the seabed, marine matter takes hold, and the site turns habitat, and even sustenance, for octopuses and other sea life (Campbell 2023b). Mirroring the nature-culture binary discussed earlier, these generative and destructive processes are characterised in the literature as natural (corrosion, degradation) and anthropogenic (fishing and trawling), often overlapping (Keith 2016).

To examine how shipwrecks both conform to and resist these binaries, I draw attention here to three specific elements of the Belitung’s first afterlife as a wreck-reef. Underpinning the selection of these elements is a desire to make space for other ways – more-than-human ways – of being. This approach, used by multispecies ethnographers and drawing on flat ontologies, seeks to recognise that all species, not just humans, have agency, and is a way of bringing together previously separate ideas about nature, culture, and the relationship between them (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010).

The first of these three elements is the so-called ‘shipworm’ (more accurately a xylophagic bivalve mollusc), the most commonly known species of which is the Teredo navalis, which burrow into and consume ships’ timbers. By destroying the wreck at the same time as sustaining itself, the shipworm is a more-than-human exemplar of how the process of becoming wreck is both destructive and beneficial at the same time, and how this benefits different communities of life (Star 1991). The second element relates to concrescence, from the Latin concrēscĕre: to grow together (Quigley 2023). The concreted conglomerates that form on shipwreck sites – consisting of sand, coral, ceramic and more – are in a constant state of becoming, and thus epitomise the processual and reciprocal nature of time spent submerged. The third element is the wreck-as-reef concept itself, in particular how the term ‘artificial reef’ implies such a thing as a non-artificial reef – a natural or even ‘virgin’ reef (Jørgensen 2017, 140) – in which shipwrecks and their humans have played no part.

Disentangling these elements – shipworm, concrescence, reef – is difficult. According to those who worked on the salvage, the Belitung wreck site was characterised by reasonably clear water, a featureless seabed of silty-sand, and proximity to an extensive reef system. The ship’s hull lay just below the sand, while a one metre high ‘wreck mound’ of conglomerated coral and cargo had formed above the seabed (Flecker 2000, 199). The only surviving timber was that which was protected by sand; any exposed timbers had been eaten by shipworms, revealing ceramics within the hull around which concretions had formed, creating a reef from which jars appeared to grow (Pearson 2023). To consider each of these elements, then, is to accept that such entanglements are in fact the defining characteristic of what happens to and with a wreck underwater.

The Belitung was built from a range of timbers, including the tropical hardwood teak (Flecker 2008). Teak is especially prized as a shipbuilding material due to its comparative resistance to shipworms, which create cavities in hull planking even as a ship sails. Capable of living at depth and without oxygen for up to six weeks, shipworms are one of the few organisms on a sailing ship that can survive and even thrive after a wrecking event, provided conditions are favourable: between 15°C and 25°C, and where salinity (salt concentration) is normal (Lippert et al. 2017). Shipworms create at the same time as they destroy, producing glucose by consuming timber. To consider the shipworm, then, is to be reminded that perfectly preserved shipwrecks come at a cost to other forms of life, and that such considerations tend not to feature in our profoundly anthropocentric and preservationist approach to shipwrecks.

While shipworms are living participants in this process of becoming wreck, the non-animate also plays a role. In our example of the Belitung, factors such as salinity, temperature, and even the positioning of the hull were critical enablers of the relationship between wreck and worm. These non-animate factors possess ‘strange agencies’, confounding perspectives that attribute agency only to the living and that privilege the land over the sea (Alaimo 2016, 113). Examples include not only the salt and warmth that allows shipworms to thrive, but also the tides and currents, the hydrothermal plumes of the deep sea, and the plastic pollution found at every vertical zone of the ocean’s water column (Quigley 2023).

The strange agency of marine matter is rendered visible in the Belitung’s so-called ‘wreck mound’, in which sand, sea life and salt water interacted with ceramics, limestone and metals from the ship’s cargo to form dense, hard, rock-like lumps. In his lyrical theorising of what he calls ‘the encrusting ocean’, Quigley describes such concretions as ‘lively collaborations among sea waters, invertebrates, ocean sediments, and drowned anthropic objects’ (Quigley 2023, 29). The mutuality of these processes is recognised in benthic ecology, in particular the concept of reciprocal influence in which the physical structure of a wreck and the species that colonise it ‘influence one another and together determine the transformations of the site over time’ (Meyer-Kaiser and Mires 2022, 815). The resulting concretions are distinctly oceanic: they are produced by, and bear the markings of, site formation processes unique to the submarine, and point to a world that is ‘changeable, processual and in a constant state of becoming’ (Anderson and Peters 2016, 5). In process philosophy, concrescence can describe how a phenomena comes into existence ‘as a thing in the world, and refer to points in the universe of high complexity, that is having many overlapping connecting relationships’ (Leadbetter 2021, 138). Conglomerations bear the traces of their past fluidity in their present solidity; the process of concrescence can only occur in fluid environments, and yet it produces dense, solid formations (Sastrawan 2020). It is important to acknowledge that fluidity does occur beyond the marine, including on land, and hence so too does concrescence. But the concrescence that fluidity gives rise to is most visible in highly fluid contexts (Leadbetter 2021), and such fluidity is the defining characteristic of the maritime domain. The process of concrescence, then, is an encrusted, dense reminder of the extent to which water is a medium that differs from earth – both in its essential fluidity, and in the way this fluidity renders concrescence more visible.

Despite the relative stabilisation and equilibrium that comes with centuries submerged, this was a dynamic environment. Devouring, flourishing and concrescing processes unfolded in the submarine interactions and increasingly inseparable entanglements between wreck, marine species and inanimate matter. The Belitung’s telos—as a tool for human trade and profit – may have changed, but certain processes continued much as they had on the surface: populating, dispersing, harbouring and destroying (Rich 2021, 150). New ways of being emerged, in which the more-than-human, rather than the human, prevailed. Ewers and other transported objects became habitats, contributing architectural complexity to a new marine ecosystem in the same way an oyster or an octopus might.

What is the best way to describe what occurred in the centuries following the sinking of the Belitung? How do we describe these submarine places and processes? Can the concept of the wreck-reef do justice to the entangled becomings that take place underwater? Scholars from a diverse range of disciplines have responded to these questions. Marine biologists have proposed the term ‘marine heritage ecology’, for example, as a way of understanding ‘how maritime heritage and underwater cultural heritage function as habitats’ (Meyer-Kaiser and Mires 2022), while elsewhere the term ‘shipwreck microbial ecology’ has been used to recognise ‘the importance and validity’ of a wreck’s afterlife (Rich, Hamdan, and Hampel 2023, 196). ‘Assemblage’, meanwhile, has been widely theorised, including by cultural theorists, archaeologists and political scientists, as they strive to explain the ability of diverse socio-material groupings to effect change (Khan 2009; Renfrew and Bahn 2016). Recently, critical maritime archaeologists have used the term ‘holobiont’ to capture the idea of a wreck as a symbiotic ecological unit, with ‘different life-forms … living together in a long-lasting relationship’ (Rich 2021, 161).⁶ Elsewhere, scholars have described as both artefact and ecofact ‘a dynamic entity that is entangled in both natural and cultural processes’, in which processes of decomposition and decay allow for more-than human participation in the creation of new knowledge (DeSilvey 2006, 324).

The most widely-accepted way of describing what happens to a wreck in the ocean, however, is by reference to the concept of the ‘artificial reef’ (Ilieva et al. 2019; Joanne and Spennemann 2015; Jørgensen 2017), a term that is insidious in its ubiquity. These are ‘manmade structure[s] that may mimic some of the characteristics of a natural reef’ (NOAA 2023). Ships are the most common of these manmade structures, although other forms – typically of concrete, steel or limestone – are also used. Whether the result of scuttling or, as was the case with the Belitung, misadventure, a sunken ship can act to restore degraded reefs and supplement healthy ones. Just like the Belitung on its otherwise featureless seabed, these structures can appear as ‘isolated “islands” of habitats’ on the seabed, in contrast to ‘natural rock reefs’ which provide more continuous seabed coverage (Paxton et al. 2020). Studies have shown that the ‘fish-attracting powers’ (Joosse 2022) of artificial reefs are stronger than those of their natural (that is, non-artificial) counterparts, in part due to their high vertical structures which are likely to support large predators (Paxton et al. 2020). But what is revealed or concealed by insisting on the artifice of these reefs? In the age of the Anthropocene, as sea temperatures rise, corals bleach and plastic becomes sediment (Trinastic 2015), I venture that it is misleading to think of a reef as either touched or untouched by humans.⁷ The Anthropocene has disrupted these categories. All reefs, artificial or otherwise, have been affected by humans. It is just a question of degree. To insist on these categories of artificial and natural, then, is to elide the processual, entangled and more-than-human characteristics of submarine occurrences.

To dwell in the submarine, as we have done here, is to suggest not only a new way of seeing, but also of ascribing value. This arises from, and is necessary to, understanding what happens to and with a wreck underwater. But to be aware of these new ontologies is also to be acutely cognisant of the paradigm shift that occurs when the wreck is discovered by humans. The strange agencies of inanimate matter, the encrusting actions of the ocean, the marine processes by which a jar becomes a habitat – all are subsumed in the name of heritage once a shipwreck is found. It is to this phase, of becoming heritage, that I now turn.

Becoming heritage

This section considers the process by which the Belitung was re-surfaced, and how this re-surfacing constituted the pivotal moment in the process of becoming heritage. After 1100 years underwater, the Belitung was, from the moment an Indonesian fisher found ‘a cup of the Tang period … with iridescent, transparent green glaze’, again part of a human-centred story (Anonymous, quoted in Pearson 2022, 58). To discover a shipwreck was to have a chance to resurrect it, if not literally then at least figuratively – to right its course and its reason for being – for the benefit of the human world. More-than-human entanglements made way for human entanglements: with people, with regulatory frameworks, with nation states, and with international institutions.

An argument might be mounted here that this was underwater cultural heritage simply waiting to be discovered – that the Belitung’s heritage credentials were already established by virtue of its being anthropogenic, over 100 years old (as required by UNESCO’s 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage), its cultural and historical significance, and, of course, its location underwater. If a ship sinks and no one ever finds it, is it still underwater cultural heritage? Yes, but only in the case of famous, searched-for shipwrecks such as Zheng He’s treasure ships or those sailed by well-known conquistadors: these are conceptualised as heritage, even if we can’t (yet) find them. But the answer is less clear when the shipwreck is lost – lost to time and memory, and lost on the seafloor. In the case of the Belitung, which I would characterise as one such ‘lost’ shipwreck, I would propose that the process of becoming heritage was connected to, possibly even contingent on, the act of discovery. Its ‘becoming heritage’, I propose, was connected to human intervention – through salvage, legislation, conservation, valuation and curation.

By the 1990s, when Indonesian fishers first encountered ceramics in the waters off Belitung Island, there was already an economic bounty on such objects. The case of the Geldermalsen shipwreck, salvaged and sold in 1986, had established a precedent whereby Chinese ceramics commanded high prices at auction. The Geldermalsen case prompted Indonesia to introduce legislation that regulated the salvage and dispersal of objects from shipwrecks in its waters (Pearson 2022). A commercial salvage company obtained permission to salvage the site, and, over two seasons in 1998 and 1999, recovered approximately 60,000 of an estimated 70,000 objects from the wreck site. Much of what was left behind was ‘entrapped’ in a lime compound, including lead ingots (used as ballast) and ceramics that had ‘hardened’ (Flecker 2001, 339–342). This lime compound was:

… somewhat enigmatic. Had it just covered the ingots, it may have been regarded as an intentional cementing process … But because it also entraps a portion of the ceramics cargo, there is no doubt that the lime compound originally formed part of the cargo, and during the wrecking process flowed out before hardening.

(Flecker 2017, 31)

This was concrescence at work, the ocean having taken such a fierce hold of the objects that to attempt to prise them from the water would have been to destroy them. The concretions also impeded efforts to survey the hull remains, which, despite their centuries underwater, were ‘extensive and relatively well preserved’ (Flecker 2017, 23). The company’s permit conditions required the salvagers to leave the hull in situ, in ‘the hope that the hull would become a tourist attraction’ (Gongaware 2012). The notion of preserving 1100-year-old timber structures in tropical waters, such that they could be developed into a revenue-raising dive attraction, was ambitious. Although organic materials can endure for a long time underwater, they degrade quickly once exposed, with light and oxygen rapidly accelerating decay (Meyer-Kaiser and Mires 2022). What remained of the hull was therefore reburied to protect it from shipworms and other unwanted attention. But following the conclusion of the second salvage season, looters broke apart the hull in their search for anything of value left behind by the salvagers (Pearson 2023, 68–69).⁸ The failure by the salvage company to excavate the hull was a major criticism of the process by which the Belitung was made heritage: that, motivated by profit, the salvagers had left behind any objects deemed ‘non-commercial’: ceramic sherds, lead ingots, a worm-eaten hull (Sudaryadi 2011, 1).

After many years of conservation, some 53,227 salvaged objects were sold to a government-backed consortium in Singapore for USD$32 million.⁹ Upon acquisition, the objects were re-named the Tang Shipwreck Collection and Singapore turned its attention to the development of an international travelling exhibition in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution. But the commercial nature of the salvage brought Singapore into conflict with the norms and principles established by the international community.

The first and most widely adopted of these was the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which took as its focus navigational, fishing, and other trade- and resource-related rights, and turned marine spaces into maritime zones. The introduction and widespread ratification of UNCLOS was a significant moment in ocean governance, following which the international community began to take steps towards the development of a dedicated convention on ‘underwater cultural heritage’ (O’Keefe 1996a, 1996b).

After much negotiation, the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage was adopted at the 2001 General Assembly (Clément 2017; Prott 2003). The 2001 Convention is underpinned by a preservationist narrative that seeks protection of heritage, through intervention, from the threat of loss. Such narratives place heritage in the service of humans:

[W]hatever is designated as heritage remains a ‘resource’ for future generations … This practice relies on the very same ideology of severing that exists behind the act of inventing a thing called ‘nature’ so that it can serve the function of ‘resource’ to culture (Rich 2021, 39).¹⁰

This ‘severing’ is evident in the Annexe to the 2001 Convention, which consists of rules concerning activities directed at underwater cultural heritage. These rules do acknowledge the ‘natural environment’ (Rule 14) that surrounds underwater cultural heritage, and the need to assess both ‘the archaeological and environmental characteristics’ of a site (Rule 15); they also require the preparation of an environmental policy so that ‘the seabed and marine life are not unduly disturbed’ (Rule 29). Despite these concessions, however, the 2001 Convention’s primary focus is directed towards those ‘traces of human existence of a cultural, historical or archaeological nature’ (Article One); it is by reference to these characteristics that heritage value is determined and ascribed. The ‘natural environment’ is separate and subservient to the archaeological and historical value of cultural heritage.

The Convention preferences in situ preservation and bans commercial exploitation, two key principles that had not been met in the management of the Belitung. At the same time, however, there was an argument to be made that criticism was being levelled at the Belitung salvage unfairly. Not only had the Convention been introduced in 2001, two years after the Belitung was salvaged, but neither Indonesia nor Singapore has ever signed or ratified it (Alisjahbana 2019). Furthermore, no laws had been broken: commercial salvage was legal in Indonesia from 1989 to 2010. More than any other shipwreck before or since, the Belitung had revealed the tensions between what was legal and what was ethical, and, moreover, between the Paris-based cultural organisation’s principles and Indonesia’s chosen model of shipwreck management.

These tensions flared into controversy in 2011 when the Smithsonian Institution withdrew its support just months before the international travelling exhibition was due to open in Washington D.C (Pearson 2023). Following concerted lobbying by American archaeologists, the Smithsonian concluded that to display these objects in a taxpayer-funded museum was akin to supporting treasure hunting and the commercial exploitation of heritage sites (Rohde 2013). Although the planned exhibition with the Smithsonian did not proceed, Singapore eventually found willing museum partners elsewhere, with each iteration of the exhibition emphasising a different aspect of the Belitung’s story, from Islam and the Middle East to Tang-dynasty China and the Maritime Silk Road. Meanwhile, a selection of objects has also been placed on permanent display at the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), where they attest to Singapore’s – not Indonesia’s – place in global maritime histories.

Having previously considered concrescence in the context of the wreck-reef, it is salutary to revisit it here in the context of becoming heritage. Whereas concrescence rendered visible the fluid and processual nature of the submarine, Quigley draws attention to how these conglomerates are ‘coded negatively’ once encountered by humans:

[C]onfronted by inscrutable concrescent assemblages, descriptive language sometimes resorts to ambivalence and disgust. At such moments, encrustations are cast as forms of ontological and epistemological obfuscation, not to say bare waste. When they work to bring wrecky remains ‘out of concretion’, archeologists [sic] and conservators seek to return ready legibility to things caught up in encrusted relations.

(Quigley 2023, 29)

Concretions ‘conceal the elegant and fine appearance’ of ceramics, and also ‘hamper further analyses on the ceramics themselves, and their conservation’ (Wang et al. 2018).

In the case of the Belitung, they restricted salvage efforts and contributed to some 10,000 objects being left on the seabed, permanently estranged from the rest of the assemblage.

But concretions can also be coded positively, not least of all by creating objects of aesthetic beauty for display. In some cases, the transformation of ceramics into habitat only heightened their aesthetic qualities and hence their value. A number of objects on display at the ACM bear evidence of the centuries they have spent underwater. These objects are exhibited alongside other ceramics that have undergone conservation and thus appear pristine by comparison.¹¹ The effect is one of time collapsing, as nature acts, and is acted upon, before the public’s eyes. These coral-encrusted storage jars and drinking cups are poignant reminders of the strange agencies of the submarine, and the entwined relationships that form between the wreck and the more-than-human. They draw attention to the more-than-human lives disrupted, and indeed ended, by the act of salvaging, conserving and curating shipwrecked objects; they bear witness to a choice, already made, about which lives matter and which ones must end in order for reef worlds to be known by humans. These decisions have implications for humans and more-than-humans alike.

Writing of shipwrecked ceramics on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum (while also considering whether they could be equally at home in a natural history museum), Quigley draws attention to the museum’s label: ‘sea sculptures’ (Quigley 2023, 2–5).¹² This label suggests they are works of art, prompting him to question precisely who is their creator: the original potters and craftspeople? The fishers who first encountered them underwater, thus setting in train a process of recovery and sale? Or the auction house that listed them, thus confirming, in the way the art market does, that they had value? Drawing on more-than-human approaches, he concludes that the existence of these encrusted ceramics points most convincingly to the creative power and agency of the sea. As with Quigley’s sea sculptures, the Belitung cargo was clearly made by humans, not machines; brushstroke analysis of Changsha bowls, for example, has revealed the quirks of individual painters (Respess 2020). But they were also made by the ocean, as their traces of coral testify. Concretions, therefore, have much to say, both above the water and below.

There are important lessons to be drawn from the Belitung and the way in which it was so assiduously co-opted as heritage. Once re-surfaced, it proved to be the ideal vessel for global, state and local actors to project their own aspirations and ascribe their own values. These vested interests, which emphasised archaeological, historical and economic value, thoroughly centred humans within the Belitung’s story. Rendered heritage, the Belitung benefited humans. It supported livelihoods through fishing and (unrealised) tourism, it offered up museum material through its objects and stories, and it lent itself to scholarly scrutiny from diverse disciplinary perspectives. But humans can also experience harm within such relationships, not only when a ship is wrecked and souls and goods are lost, but also in the legacy that unfolds over decades or centuries. In the case of the Belitung, this harm was caused by the institutional violence of international organisations and national museums, which patronised shipwreck management models that did not align with their principles.

Toward the multispecies wreck

This article has dwelt on the time the Belitung spent submerged. This was not just a pause between ‘when it sailed’ and ‘when it was discovered’; this was a period in which the wreck acted on the ocean, and the ocean acted on the wreck. Encrustation of ceramics created habitats for coral and trepang, but also objects of aesthetic beauty. The severity of the concretion allowed some of these habitats to prevail, with the ocean refusing to yield its work. Other objects, however, could be removed, benefiting both the salvagers, who profited from their finds, and the museum-going public, whose gaze now falls on these objects. Decisions were made that prioritised human access to these objects over the more-than-humans inhabiting the objects. All the while, Teredo navalis digested timber that was supposed to support local livelihoods through wreck tourism, disadvantaging those who sought to survey the site or protect it from further degradation – but benefiting the shipworms.

The limitations of anthropocentric approaches are evident. If we focus on these only-human aspects, the story of the Belitung’s hull, for example, is indeed defined by destruction, neglect and loss. But introducing a more-than-human approach allows us to see the hull, and the wreck more broadly, from a more generative perspective. The value of these timbers was not commercial. But they did provide sustenance for marine animals, and structure for new habitats. As Rich articulates, underwater ruins allow us to ‘see through, even if only momentarily, the superficial underpinnings of the nature/culture dialectic’ (Rich 2021, 40). The Belitung’s hull resists solely anthropocentric categories, in which wrecks are rendered heritage and hence resource. Instead, the hull was, simultaneously, legacy, heritage, livelihood and habitat. The ‘value’ of this hull, if we are to speak of value at all, is not in its conceptualisation as (lost) heritage, but in its ability to muddy the conceptual waters entirely.

Considering the more-than-human helps to shift our thinking from the traditions that normalise human-centred thinking about nature and culture, and to identify new ways of thinking that better account for the realities – of rapid change, of warming seas, of mass extinctions, and of overwhelming accumulation – of the Anthropocene.¹³ By attending to the more-than-human relationships in which shipwrecks are entangled – just like the very seaweed that is linked etymologically to the notion of entanglement (Chao 2022, 208) – I have sought to resist the fiction of separation between nature and culture. Instead, the concept of the multispecies shipwreck that I have developed here is one that recognises the profoundly relational characteristics of wrecks and the watery world(s) they inhabit and, furthermore, that many of these relationships exist without human intervention. It is a concept that elevates and seeks to do justice to the agency of the more-than-human and the inanimate. Simply because some of these relationships – between shipworm and timber, for example – are more-than-human does not necessarily make them benign or harmonious, however. Just as human/wreck relationships can be exploitative and violent, so too can these more-than-human/wreck relationships. My purpose in drawing attention to the potential for exploitation by more-than-humans is not to advocate for one form of exploitation over another (‘human exploitation bad, more-than-human exploitation good’), but to instead emphasise the new perspectives offered by flat ontologies and in particular the insights generated by disrupting accepted hierarchical categories.

A multispecies approach to thinking with shipwrecks is also one that embraces flux, decay and transience. Vessels, and the wrecks they become, are constantly in motion and in the process of becoming. To borrow from Han, shipwrecks, and the heritage they become, are ‘not just something to be extracted from a repository like an archive, but rather, something that can be enacted’ (Han 2019, 480). The ocean is continually being reconstituted, by ‘the non-human and the human, the biological and the geophysical, the historic and the contemporary’ (Steinberg 2013, 157)’. But this is only half the story; as Quigley’s sea sculptures remind us, the ocean is itself continually reconstituting, making over and making anew. Thinking about shipwrecks as in process rather than as lost offers us the chance to repeat and revisit memories and legacies many times over, and to return to these remembrances in different forms. Rather than vesting so much in the materiality of the wreck (and finding only degradation and corrosion that way), might we not, as DeSilvey suggests, perhaps proceed in a way that ‘slowly pulls the remnant into other ecologies and expressions of value’ (DeSilvey 2006)? To do so would be to resist the regimes of value currently associated with underwater cultural heritage. Instead, this approach acknowledges the role of disturbance in creating new forms of knowledge and understanding.

Finally, a multispecies approach to shipwrecks requires a reckoning with the ‘strange temporal ontologies of the sea’ (Neimanis 2019, 61, fn64). Time seems to function differently at sea, and even within sea, from the surface to the water column to the seabed. The ocean can support life based not on photosynthesis but chemosynthesis, removing any reliance on the temporality of the sun. Time seems to crawl and even compress in abyssal worlds; ‘species live and die at a slower place’, writes Alaimo (2017, 153), while Rich (2021, 117) draws attention to water’s ability to undermine the sense of time ‘as both passing and linear’.¹⁴ Others describe as ‘uncanny’ the way oceanic temporalities appear to accelerate growth and decay (DeLoughrey 2016, 250). Meanwhile, hydro-feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis describes the temporality of the ocean as one of ‘suspension’ or ‘latency’, drawing our attention to the suspense of waiting for the effects of the past – specifically the post-World War II disposal of chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea – to make themselves known in the present (Neimanis 2019, 48–49).

To continue to develop the concept of the multispecies wreck will require both a move away from anthropocentrism and a coming to terms with the generative potential of loss. We must be willing to get comfortable with the strangeness of the sea; as a land(sea)scape and as an imaginary, it is simultaneously unfathomable and familiar. Paradoxically, attending to the otherness of the ocean will allow us to see not only its differences, but also its similarities, with the land. This is a co-constitutive relationship that, like the nature-culture divide with which we began, can no longer be thought of in binary terms. Multidisciplinarity is essential, with significant theoretical potential arising from bringing existing domains of expertise into conversation with other ways of thinking. The challenges are many. Who can access a multispecies shipwreck, for example? Should human access be prioritised, through excavation and display, or do we privilege more-than-human access, and the associated loss of the material form? What might this mean for the conservationist imperative, and the claims we make to longevity? Despite, or in fact because of these challenges, the submarine holds a promise: of new ontologies of ourselves and the heritage we seek to claim, and as an imaginary with(in) which to rethink the relationships between ourselves and the world we live in.

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.

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).

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).