Georgia Holly et al, .eds., "Heritage in the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) and Beyond" (U Edinburgh Press, 2025)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Are all batteries the same?
That's like asking if all soccer players are the same. Take Messi, the most decorated player ever. Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracell. Is there any other battery with power boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracell. Remember, goats only trust goats, because they're built different. And Messi, only trusts Duracell.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:00)
The new LinkedIn Hiring Pro can't undo your last hire. The human postponer. They were the master of one phrase. I'll circle back on that. But three months later, you were the one doing all their work and wondering how big that circle is.
But LinkedIn Hiring Pro can take the hiring load off your plate. By automating the hiring busy work from the initial job post to scheduling interviews.
Hire right the first time with LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Post a free job today at linkedin.com/quality.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:31)
Welcome to The New Books Network.

**Helen Dewar** (1:35)
Welcome to Oceanic Studies, an interdisciplinary podcast that examines the past, present, and future of ocean governance on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Helen Dewar. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Athena Trakadas, External Associate Professor of Maritime Archaeology at the University of Copenhagen and Senior Researcher at the Viking Ship Museum. Her most recent publication is Heritage in the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021 to 2030 and Beyond, which she co-authored with five fellow members of the Ocean Decade Heritage Network and the Cultural Heritage Framework Programme. This was published by the University of Edinburgh earlier this year.
Welcome to Oceanic Studies, Athena.

**Athena Trakadas** (2:31)
Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

**Helen Dewar** (2:33)
I'd like to begin by how you came to study Maritime or Marine Archaeology. And if you could tell us a bit about what that field encompasses.

**Athena Trakadas** (2:46)
Sure. Thank you. I had been interested in all things with the sea growing up in Southern California.
And I had spent a lot of time swimming and swimming in pools. And I had the chance to get certified as a scuba diver when I was 12 years old. And it was just always something that I enjoyed doing. And at the same time, I was interested in old things and history and digging in the dirt. And fortuitously, when I was at university, I had a really good advisor and he was helping me look for summer fieldwork opportunities one year. And he knew I was a scuba diver and he said, hey, would you be interested in doing archaeology underwater? And I said, I had no idea that was even possible to do. And so I ended up going and working on a field school in Israel that was at a harbor site underwater. And I was from that moment on really just bitten by the field and decided to then I majored in archaeology and classical archaeology and then also went on to then study maritime archaeology at graduate school.

**Helen Dewar** (3:54)
Yeah, I relate in a certain way both to the awakening interest in, for me, old things, material culture, going to, in my case, living history museums a lot in my youth.
But also as someone who's grown up on the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, I find what you do fascinating and I was interested in the origin of the diving. But I was also wondering, could you tell us a bit about how a dive unfolds, an archaeological dive, so for example, how you come to locate the underwater heritage you want to examine? And then the planning, I can imagine that maybe sometimes you don't always dive, but there may be perhaps you use cameras or robotic equipment. And so if you could just tell us a bit about that.

**Athena Trakadas** (4:49)
Sure, and one of the things to stress about being a maritime archaeologist is that you don't have to dive, and a lot of archaeologists don't dive, but some of us do.
That is just simply a way to carry out our fieldwork, but there's other ways to do that. And in some cases, if you're locating or trying to locate a site underwater, sometimes it comes about purely by accident. There's some great stories, for example, in the Mediterranean, where a lot of the known sites or sites that were discovered early on in the late 1950s and 1960s, they were known to sponge divers or fishermen. They knew where these sites were. They had maybe pulled up amphoras, these ceramic containers, in their fishing nets, or the sponge divers had been down and seen the pile of amphora on the seabed. And archaeologists went around talking to these fishermen and were able to then go and scuba dive. The scuba was really a new invention from Cousteau and Gauguin's development of the aqualung in the middle of the 20th century. So people were actually able to now not just kind of use the tin-tin bronze diving helmet to fish for sponges, but actually able to have the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus to go down and for a limited amount of time access sites. And that really opened up the underwater world for archaeology. And they were pioneers in the Mediterranean and also in Northern Europe who were experimenting with this in the late 1950s and 60s. People like Olof Kronlen-Pedersen, Olof Olsen in Denmark, also in the Mediterranean, George Bass and Peter Throckmorton.