Paper short abstract:

Divination methodology explored as creative transontological technique, alongside archival retrieval and critical heritage studies, offering new perspectives for the interpretation of underwater cultural heritage on the Southern African Indian Ocean coastline in the era of climate change.

Paper long abstract:

2024 has been a watershed year in the frequency and intensity of major climate events. On the Southern African Indian Ocean coastline, increasingly powerful storm surges are reshaping the coastline, in the process revealing fragments of shipwrecks hidden in the sand for centuries. Originating in the era of Portuguese expansion, violent insertion to dominate Indian Ocean trade routes and the appropriation of existing insitutions of slavery as a pre-cursor to the industrial scale of trans-oceanic slavery that would follow, these shipwrecks offer a record both of the origins of the modern world sytem which produces the era of the Anthropocene and climate change, and the trajectories of alternative lifeways as survivors from the margins were incorporated into indigenous communities. This paper utilises a critical heritage studies approach, informed by the theoretical position of Trouillot's explorations on power and the production of history (1995), and Haartman's critical fabulation (2019), to explore divination methodology as creative response to the ontological limitations of previous approaches to interpreting underwater cultural heritage in Africa, alongside archival retrieval of marginal stories of shipwreck survivors and their afterlives.