KEYNOTE: Making the Invisible Visible: Launching and Curating a Virtual Museum for Underwater Cultural Heritage

On Monday, January 27 at 4 pm we are opening up our 3 day cultural hackathon and start with a fantastic underwater world experience with Maja.

The seabed is often regarded as the world’s largest museum, yet it is also the world’s most inaccessible museum. UNESCO’s 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage highlights the importance of preserving these underwater sites in situ while emphasizing the need for public engagement and knowledge-sharing. However, turning these principles into practice presents considerable challenges. Malta’s 8,000 years of human history are evident in its landscape and seascape. Recent offshore surveys have revealed that the islands’ rich and complex past is also reflected on the seabed, however, the submerged nature of these sites, results in an “out of sight, out of mind” mindset. To address this issue, the virtual museum www.underwatermalta.org was launched, aiming to connect Malta’s hidden underwater cultural heritage with a global audience, especially the non-diving public. By bringing these submerged treasures to the surface in a digital format, the platform offers people the opportunity to explore these sites from the comfort of their homes. This presentation examines the principle of sharing underwater cultural heritage and the obstacles to achieving it. It provides an in-depth overview of the methods employed to collect raw data under the challenging conditions of deep-water environments. Drawing from experience in documentin

g numerous wrecks, it also explores the creation and implementation Underwater Malta, a platform designed specifically to digitally “exhibit” underwater archaeological sites and make them accessible to the public.

Maja Pace Sausmekat is an archaeologist and heritage manager working with the Underwater Cultural Heritage Unit (UCHU) within Heritage Malta, the island’s state agency for the protection and management of Malta’s cultural heritage. The UCHU is tasked with the documentation of underwater cultural heritage, valorisation, and site protection, as well as public access management and public outreach.

As keynote speaker of the cultural hackathon 2025 Maja will deep dive with us onsite and online. Register here!