Proceedings of the 2014 Conference
The 2nd Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage (www.apconf.org) was held from 12-16 May 2014 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The conference was hosted by the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation and the University of Hawaii Marine Option Program. More than 139 participants from 27 countries around the world joined together in Honolulu to discuss common goals in underwater cultural heritage research and preservation.
The 2014 event:
- addressed management and protection strategies of underwater cultural heritage in Asia and the countries of the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the 21st century;
- facilitated regional cooperation through the development of academic and governmental networks in the Asia-Pacific region;
- provided a forum for discussion of technical and ethical issues related to underwater cultural heritage and underwater archaeology;
- freely distributed information across the region and worldwide.
APCONF 2014 included three days of concurrent presentations, organized into 15 individual sessions. Eighty-four of the session presenters submitted papers for publication. APCONF papers were reviewed and edited by the committee and published in the hard copy of the conference proceedings (and available individually here). The study and preservation of underwater cultural heritage benefits directly from the knowledge shared here by these contributing authors, who are at the forefront of the UCH discipline across the Asia Pacific region. The Planning Committee would like to extend our gratitude to the authors and session organizers for making this publication possible. While copyright in the conference proceedings as a whole is vested in the 2014 Asia-Pacific Regional Conference Planning Committee, the copyright of the individual papers belongs to their authors.
While the presentations in Honolulu have ended the conference lives on in this digital collection on the Museum of Underwater Archaeology. The papers are presented here organized by session (see the links below). Most session pages include a video introduction with the session organizers. In addition visitors to this site can watch interviews with the keynote speakers (see below). By making this outstanding collection freely available online it is our hope that the conversations begun in Manila 2011 and held in Hawaii 2014 will continue into the future.
Funding for the publication of the conference proceedings was generously provided by: National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, University of Hawaii Marine Option Program, NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, Bureau of Ocean Energy and Management, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, UNESCO, the Ocean Foundation, University of Hawaii, The Field Museum, Ships of Discovery, Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology, Inc., SEAMEO SPAFA Regional Centre for Arts and Archaeology, Maney Publishing, and the Tokyo Institute of Marine Science and Technology.
-Dr. Hans Van Tilburg, Chair of the Conference Organizing Committee