Antony Firth (Wessex Archaeology)

Virtually every state protects archaeological remains. Each state decides what is important about its past, and provides legal mechanisms to help the selected items to survive longer. States project their conception of the past into the future through the monuments that survive, whilst the material basis for understanding alternative pasts is left to decay. The impact of the state’s intervention is all the more powerful because it takes effect by materially altering the everyday environments that people inhabit. Subliminally, we dwell in an historic environment created by the state without necessarily being aware of different pasts, or of different futures. The role of archaeology in legitimising the state is multi-fold: with the help pf archaeologists, the truth of the state’s narrative is made self-evident in the humps, bumps, bones and stones that surround us.

Many states have a historical narrative that is expressed physically in the environment, and which will vary from state to state. But there is a deeper ‘truth’ projected by all modern states, which is that the nation-state is the ultimate form of social organisation. One polity is tied to one people within one boundary. Complexities of representation, identity and spatial interrelation are all subsumed within this single, dominating dimension. Careless reliance upon nationalist paradigms in recording and interpreting the past implicates archaeologists in providing historical legitimacy to the nation-state, whilst obscuring trajectories that might see the emergence of different modes of social organisation.

It need not be so. Maritime archaeology is the archaeology of ‘between’: between polities; between people; and between boundaries. The sea sits ill with the nation-state. Yet maritime archaeology is more often wrapped in the flag than not, especially in states whose historical narrative conjectures ‘a maritime nation’.

In the UK, new laws are being introduced to protect heritage, including maritime heritage. In Scotland, Wales and England, the mechanisms used by the state to select and protect maritime monuments are undergoing change. There are opportunities to encourage a maritime archaeology that – in the language of sustainability – does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. But there is every chance that new forms of heritage protection will, once again, prejudice the survival of ancient material that hint at a non-nationalist past, or at a post-nationalist future.