Page 220 - Manual for Activities directed at the Underwater Cultural Heritage

public access. A management plan aims at balancing threats and opportunities, and aims to ensure that threats become opportunities. Threats and opportunities can be related to:
i. Archaeological interventions
ii. Commercial exploitation
iii. Development pressure
iv. Climate change
v. Natural disasters
vi. Tourism
vii. Regional development
viii. Demographic development
c. Preventive protection
Characteristics of underwater sites like depth, currents, visibility, accessibility and most of all, the fact that it is an environment where external breathing support is needed, make protection against interferences complex and sometimes impossible.
Many preventive measures can be taken. Some are purely administrative, but have important implications all the same. The site can be excluded from the planning of other developments, or from fisheries’ permits. It can be included in the patrol routes of government vessels, whose primary functions are navigation safety or border control, or in operational permits for recreational diving schools and tour operators on the condition that they keep a close watch.
Furthermore, ranges of less costly and more expensive techniques to protectively cover the most vulnerable parts, and to prevent degradation of certain materials, have been developed over the last decades, as was touched upon earlier in this chapter. Every underwater archaeologist should be aware of the possibilities. Note that a management plan aims at improving the conditions for preservation; it does not need to instantly implement every possible measure. Rather, it should envisage regularly monitoring the effect of measures taken and fine-tuning accordingly.
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Conservation and site management