The Koh Sdach Shipwreck as a Catalyst for Participatory Underwater Cultural Heritage Governance in the Kingdom of Cambodia

Sarah Ward

The 15th-century Koh Sdach shipwreck — a site at the centre of cross-border heritage crime, competing geopolitical interests, and unresolved questions about who owns the past and who speaks for it— is one of Cambodia's earliest known underwater archaeological sites and a compelling case for rethinking how underwater cultural heritage (UCH) is identified, valued, and governed across the Indo-Pacific.

Drawing on a mixed-methods, community-based participatory action research design integrating archaeological investigation, archival research, and ethnographic inquiry, this paper examines both the shipwreck assemblage and the social, political, and governance dynamics shaping its protection. It engages critical debates on co-management and the decolonisation of heritage practice, reframing heritage responsibility as co-produced and negotiated.

Preliminary findings suggest that Koh Sdach is not simply an archaeological site: in the absence of effective governance, it has become a locus of contested knowledge, political negotiation, and culturally situated meaning-making. These conditions reflect a UCH management regime constrained by fragmented institutional capacity, inadequate legal protection, and the persistence of universalist heritage frameworks that privilege Eurocentric, materially reductive conceptions of value — producing a governance regime structurally misaligned with Cambodia's social, cultural, and political realities.

In response, the paper argues for more inclusive, context-sensitive approaches to UCH governance in Cambodia and the wider Indo-Pacific — approaches that realign professional practice with situated knowledge systems, lived heritage relations, and community priorities, ensuring that heritage governance is not only technically effective, but socially legitimate and locally grounded.