Shipwrecks’ Underwater Mysteries—Identifying Commonalities Out of Globally-Distributed Knowledge

Abstract

Tourism trends towards authentic, experience-based products have brought to the forefront lesser-known destinations, e.g., small and medium-sized Mediterranean islands. These can gain competitiveness on the ground of their distinguished land and Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH), thus opening up new directions for their future sustainable development. Sustainable exploitation of UCH, though, calls for dedicated planning endeavors and respective UCH data acquisition/management. However, while the planning discipline can offer effective approaches and tools for properly handling cultural heritage, a deficit of sufficient, pertinent and well-documented UCH data is noticed, e.g., data on shipwrecks as part of UCH. The latter is the focus of this work, aiming, as a first step, to illuminate aspects of a shipwreck database, relevant to planners’ requests. Towards this end, global-wide distributed knowledge is explored in an effort to identify potentialities and limitations, content commonalities, shipwreck attributes so far recorded, (spatial) planning requirements, to name but a few. Knowledge acquired from this exploration can feed conceptualization of a planning-oriented shipwreck database. This can be replicable to various national/regional contexts; and is capable of providing well-structured shipwrecks’ content that can steer strategic planning efforts towards authentic ensembles of people’s history and culture in remote and less-privileged Mediterranean islands.