Page 130 - Manual for Activities directed at the Underwater Cultural Heritage

the planning of funding should include all stages of the process. Conservation should be catered for from the beginning. Report preparation, and a communication and dissemination plan should be included, and all practicable measures for long-term curation and documentation of recovered artefacts should be taken in advance of any activity directed at underwater heritage.
Rule 17 starts with the clause ‘Except in cases of emergency to protect underwater cultural heritage...’, as it is hardly possible to address unforeseen situations and to integrally manage all potential ramifications. Nevertheless, it can be foreseen that unanticipated situations will occur. This needs to be taken into account when a policy for protection of underwater cultural heritage is developed. Like a project design, an emergency strategy should include provisions for conservation, documentation of the site and recovered artefacts, curation of recovered artefacts, report preparation, and dissemination. In such a strategy plan, ‘unforeseen situations’ are best dealt with through arrangements using the heritage infrastructure of a country or region. Long- term curation can be arranged through specific repositories or existing museums. The fieldwork in such an arrangement may well fall to another body. Universities may be involved in specialize research. Museums may have conservation departments, but other conservation facilities may equally exist. Despite this, conservation is a bottle-neck. So it may be wise to include cross-border institutional cooperation in the arrangements, building on expertise available elsewhere. Typically, different institutions and partners in such arrangements will have their own funding base (and funding problems), and it is not necessary to merge them for such an arrangement to work. This should not, however, prevent from planning in an integral way.
The entrepreneurial approach
In planning an individual underwater archaeological project, it is advisable to adopt an entrepreneurial approach. Before the question of financing is settled, it is recommendable to devise a project structure,
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Funding