Page 423 - Green - Maritime Archaeology: A Technical Handbook. 2nd ed

402 Maritime Archaeology: A Technical Handbook, Second Edition
are acutely aware of the problem of souveniring and at least they discour- age this activity. Within maritime national parks, conservation of the envi- ronment is an important issue which affects not just the marine life, but in many cases the cultural heritage as well.
In Australia the provisions of the Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976 enable wreck sites to be protected for reasons that include educational and recre- ational criteria (Amess, 1983, McCarthy, 1983). Under this form of legisla- tion, wreck sites are perceived as a type of multifunctional, cultural property; sites can be considered as part of the society’s cultural heritage, but are to be freely available for all members of the society to enjoy (see Amess, 1983; Crawford, 1977; Green and Henderson, 1977; Green et al., 1981). Additionally, the Australian government signed a pioneering maritime archaeological agreement with the Dutch government (the Australian-Netherlands Agreement on Old Dutch Shipwrecks; ANCODS) whereby the Dutch government granted any rights that they had to the VOC shipwrecks on the Western Australian coast. The basis of this agree- ment was that the archaeological collection should be kept together in Western Australia and with small representative collections of duplicate material being allocated to the Dutch and Commonwealth governments, but that at any time the collections should always be available for study (Bolton, 1977; Green and Henderson, 1977, 1983b).
Two countries that have considerable problems with legislation are the UK and the United States. In the UK attempts have been made to improve the legislation protecting archaeological wreck sites. Redknap and Dean (1989) noted that:
Not only is it perfectly legal to destroy archaeological sites within British ter- ritorial waters, Part IX of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894 actually encourages such destruction by financially rewarding people for recovering archaeological material, regardless of whether removed by a grab on the end of a crane, or during disciplined archaeological excavations.
The authors identified three weaknesses in the existing legislation: (1) the Receivers of Wreck have no training nor expertise to deal with mater- ial recovered from an archaeological wreck site, nor can the Receivers offi- cially receive advice from expert bodies; (2) there is no procedure to ensure that archaeologically significant material is preserved; and (3) the system of awards is unsatisfactory and in fact penalizes archaeological bodies and museums engaged in underwater excavation (Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee, 1989). An example of the type of situation that can occur was illustrated by the authors:
This system [archaeological material handled by the Receiver of Wreck] even applies to material recovered from sites designated under the 1973