Good practice: international collaboration on shared difficult heritage

This article presents a good practice that developed in the context of an international collaboration around a site of shared cultural heritage. It involved a joint Dutch-Indonesian investigation into the disappearance of the wrecks of three Dutch warships. They sank off the coast of Indonesia in WWII.

The good practice refers to the way in which this project, albeit propelled by a painful event, was framed and guided by a three-track-research plan, and was based on open discussions between both countries. To write this article, we talked to Robert de Hoop of the International Programme for Maritime Heritage of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) and Shinatria Adhityatama of ARKENAS, the National Research Center for Archaeology in Indonesia. Both were closely involved in this project as maritime archaeologists.

This is the main article of the digital newsletter Sharing Heritage Expertise nr. 13 2020.