The Legacy of the Oceans: Past Marine Exploitation and the Sustainable Development Agenda

Summary

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

SDG14 Life Below Water recognises the economic and social benefits that sustainable use of marine resources can provide including enhanced food security, sustainable energy generation, and poverty eradication through marine orientated livelihood opportunities. While environmental sciences and ecological approaches have had a major role in the development of solutions, the potential role of marine cultural heritage as a usable resource is not widely appreciated. Providing deep-time data over millennia, the marine archaeological resource has more to offer than solutions based on tourism. For example, coastal management strategies and conservation projects rely on short-term baseline data that, at best, cover little more than a century. As a result, projects and strategies put into place are limited, and do not fully reflect ecosystem dynamics or the relative resilience of different species to the effects of both human activities and changes driven by long term climatic and other environmental factors. This paper will argue that a marine cultural heritage outlook (prioritising human interaction with the sea in all its diversity) could provide the conceptual framework that unites, stimulates and informs interdisciplinary responses to the challenges set out in SDG 14.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• HumAnE Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24590