The Blue Frontier

Temporalities of Salvage and Extraction at the Seabed

Bibliographic Data

ID3856486
AuthorsLisa Yin Han (0000-0002-5328-3775, corresponding author), Lisa Han (0000-0002-9451-084X)
Year2019
Volume27
Issue4
Pages463-481
Publication date2019-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueConfigurations (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1063-1801 • E-ISSN: 1080-6520
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/con.2019.0031
OpenAlexW2979473997
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited13

This paper examines the seabed's role as alternately an archive of technological feats and failures, and as a resource frontier. Beginning with nautical archaeological paradigms of cultural heritage and their enactment in politically motivated salvage expeditions, I explore how the deep seabed is simultaneously understood as a resource frontier, framing both salvage and seabed mining vis-à-vis settlement frontier imaginaries. I show that within legal regulation of the deep seabed, universal narratives of shared inheritance act in concert with opportunistic recoveries of minerals and archaeological objects. This leads me to posit a salvage-extraction dynamic, in which notions of the archive are superimposed onto the seabed and its extractive possibilities, producing it as a static reserve through which historical as well as progressive narratives emerge

Archaeology · Art · Frontier · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Seabed · Temporalities · Archaeological Research and Protection · Computer Science · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Law · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · Geology · Oceanography

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