Joe Flatman

A Climate of Fear: Recent British Policy and Management of Coastal Heritage

Abstract This article discusses the various environmental threats that exist to British coastal heritage sites and the steps currently being taken to monitor, manage, and address such threats. The article concludes by considering the possibilities of enhanced site management that could be offered by recent legislative reform.

What Public Engagement in Archaeology Really Means

This chapter explores what “public engagement” in archaeology really means, and whether or not all forms of “engagement” are always positive. Drawing from their professional experience, the authors consider aspects of archaeology that are particularly conducive to public involvement, as well as those that are not. The authors consider in particular situations they have encountered where their role as “professional” archaeologists have sometimes been at odds with public perceptions of archaeology and archaeologists. Flatman draws in particular from his experience of working in relation to UK’s “Portable Antiquities Scheme” where he regularly witnesses the problems of excessive interest in archaeology; Chidester and Gadsby from their experiences of developing “community” archaeology projects in USA, where they witness the opposite, a lack of sustained popular interest in archaeology.

Places of Special Meaning: Westerdahl’s Comet, “Agency,” and the Concept of the “Maritime Cultural Landscape”

Christer Westerdahl’s 1992 journal article “The maritime cultural landscape” initiated a rethinking of every aspect of maritime archaeology. Taking its lead from Westerdahl’s original work and subsequent contributions to the debate surrounding the maritime cultural landscape by Westerdahl and others, this chapter draws on a series of British case studies to consider four interrelated themes: first, how concepts such as “landscape learning” (how people in prehistory moved, both literally and cognitively, through environments) can contribute to the understanding of the maritime cultural landscape; second, how hard, often datable, evidence for coastal settlement can feed into ongoing debates about evidence for “agency” in the marine zone; third, how studies of different sites’ “fine-grained” assemblages can add to this debate about the nature of the maritime cultural landscape, and fourth how studies of ritual landscapes and the significance of “natural” landscapes can also contribute to this debate.

What the Walrus and the Carpenter Did Not Talk About: Maritime Archaeology and the Near Future of Energy

This chapter is concerned with the entanglement of energy resources and archaeology over the next 30 years and beyond. It considers the impact of the global energy crisis upon the marine archaeological resource, and by default, it also considers questions of climate change and archaeology. The early–mid twenty-first century is set to become the age of conflict over dwindling resources, especially hydrocarbons, and also (one hopes), the age of the expansion of renewable energy replacements for hydrocarbons. In this conflict, the seas and oceans will become the primary global battleground of both governments and industries, since these are the last great (largely) unexploited areas of the world. Together, such immediate-term, global geopolitical events look likely to present a new challenge to the archaeological community that will confront it with serious questions about cultural heritage research, resource and rescue priorities, public access and communication, and professional ethics.

Conserving Marine Cultural Heritage: Threats, Risks and Future Priorities

Abstract This special volume of Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites debates the priorities and pressures involved in the conservation and management of archaeological sites in the marine zone — above, across and below water on an international scale. The contributors represent a cross-section of practitioners drawn from industry, the public sector and academia, working literally around the entire globe from Australia to Argentina by way of the UK, US and elsewhere. They consider, among other things, threats to coastal and submerged cultural resources in the light of farming and industrial development, the management of historic wreck sites and viability of in situ preservation, the impact of national programmes such as the UK Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, and the future management of underwater cultural heritage via tools such as the newly ratified 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.

Conclusion: The contemporary relevance of archaeology - Archaeology and the real world?

Archaeology is not only a quintessential part of the fabric of society, it adds to the flow society’s lifeblood. Recent figures (2009–2010) for the heritage industry of Great Britain show tourist spending alone accounts for £4.3 billion of GDP. In the “money-talks” and bottom-line context of the modern day, figures such as this demonstrate that the identification, study, preservation and interpretation of the past encompassed within archaeology are relevant, even irrespective of its many other intangible benefits, and society without it would be both culturally and fiscally poorer. In view of the future, archaeology has the unique capacity to genuinely challenge dystopic predictions of societies hemmed and reduced by the impacts of climate change and resource scarcity with data and models of human ingenuity, creativity and capacity for change and sustainability. This chapter sets out an agenda for a far more active field and activist archaeologists within it. The Great Recession and the austerity measures developed to combat it leave no doubt that decision-makers at the highest levels continue to see archaeology and its broad family of social sciences and humanities as expendable. It is the challenge of all who can see archaeology’s immense and diverse value to speak loudly in its defence.