The Belitung Shipwreck. A story of the challenges of Underwater Cultural Heritage
By Luke Olbrich
What is this story about?
Protection, exploration, and analysis of underwater cultural heritage still represent a challenging field. In most cases, legal protection is lacking and looting and sale on the black market of such underwater heritage sites is commonplace.
This short paper asks the question why have so many UNESCO member states refused to ratify this important Convention?
By examining the Republic of Indonesia and the 1998-1999 process of discovery, recovery, and exploitation of the Belitung wreck excavation, we investigate the challenges and opportunities of underwater cultural heritage conservation and suggest how some of these might be better addressed.
Background
Underwater Cultural Heritage provides important, and often well-preserved historical evidence of different civilisations and of their interactions over time, given their unique protection underwater without human interference. In particular shipwrecks and their contents, obscured by water, have largely been protected. Despite the establishment on November 2, 2001, and entry into force on January 2, 2009, of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, a majority of UNESCO members have never ratified the Convention (as of writing only 72 of 193 member states). Amongst the multiple acts and rules, the 2001 UNESCO UCH Convention followed a few key principles.
- An obligation to preserve underwater cultural heritage for the benefit of humanity (Article 2.2).
- Preference for in situ preservation (in its original location on the seafloor) as a first option (Article 2.5).
- A ban on the commercial exploitation of underwater cultural heritage (Article 2.7).
- Rule 2 offers details related to the ban on commercial exploitation: underwater cultural heritage shall not be traded, sold, bought, or bartered as commercial goods.
The Belitung Shipwreck – A case study of the challenges of Underwater Cultural Heritage
As the crossroads between East Asia and the Indian Ocean, Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago nation comprised of over 17,000. Carrying people, religion, culture, and trade for millennia between the most sophisticated societies of the age with numerous shipwrecks
and other underwater cultural heritage regularly discovered.
These sites continue to inform and enlighten anthropologists and historians. And despite its rich UCH, Indonesia continues to refuse to ratify and so comply with the terms of the UNESCO Underwater Heritage Convention.
Local fishermen in 1998 discovered off the island of Belitung on the sea bottom, the remains of a Persian Gulf-built trading dhow and all of its contents from the mid-9th century CE, estimated around 830. The wreck provides an effective case study of the unique challenges of UCH exploration and conservation.
Location of the Belitung shipreck (Google Earth Pro).
The dhow is believed to have sunk on its return journey from China back to the Persian Gulf laden with tens of thousands of ceramics, treasured in Abbasid Dynasty Persia and Arabia, along with precious metal and other objects.
The wreck revealed the largest single collection of 9th century CE Tang Dynasty objects, most intact and well preserved, with over 60,000 objects in total, the majority of which are Changsa pottery.
Precious Abbasid ceramic vessels from dhow of Belitung (Ministry of Marine Affair and fisheries of the Republic of Indonesia).
Apparently, the local fishermen sold the location of the wreck to an international private excavation company, Seabed Explorations NZ https://tilmanwalterfang.org/, a New Zealand registered private company that did a survey and subsequently applied for and received an excavation licence issued by the Indonesian government.
In the end, in September 2003 the Indonesian government agreed to be paid USD 2.5 million and the return of the entire salvage of another Indonesian wreck Seabed had completed (the Intan) in its entirety and grant full ownership of the Belitung find to Seabed. “The deal reveals the extent to which the Indonesian regulatory framework could be manipulated and, furthermore, that the consequences of manipulation could be negative and positive.”
The Belitung shipwreck collection on display in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum Map (Singapore Asian Civilization).
Following the excavation, and cataloguing and conservation/restoration of the contents of the wreck privately, Seabed NZ closed an agreement on for USD 32 million with the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) on behalf of the Singapore government. The collection is housed at Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), under the care of curators and professional archeologists and so making the entire collection available to researchers and the public. The good news in this case, a massive collection of over 60,000 Tang era artefacts is available intact, under well-funded curators and conservators available to the public and researchers, which if simply left in situ would likely have been looted, dispersed, and sold into the black market. Unfortunately, Michael Flecker, in visiting the remaining ‘in situ’ Belitung site again in 2013 described that “the entire hull had been ripped apart” by looters. The unintended consequences of a highly publicized salvage work acting as an incentive to further destruction of UCH.
Conclusion
The 2001 UNESCO Convention should be modified to allow member states to analyse and judge the risks on a case by case basis the preference for in-situ and ongoing protection clauses that continue to prove to be unrealistic.
Defining "commercial exploitation" in a way that allows signatories to contract with for-profit salvage companies that follow far more detailed minimum standards for archaeological UCH best practices, will provide guidelines for government officials to follow, and would make the 2001 Convention more effective and would encourage more States to join.
Without such modification, both at a national law and at a UNESCO level, arguably the public, academics and archeologists are likely to continue to permanently lose valuable underwater cultural heritage to simple looting and loss forever.
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