Miss Abigail Darville

It was the third year of my undergraduate degree when I was introduced to maritime archaeology, thanks to a diving internship in Cyrpus and a two-week field school with the Nautical Archaeology Society and the University of Cyprus. After a few more fieldschools in other interdisciplinary fields, I decided to pursue maritime archaeology. In pursuit of this, I attended the University of Southampton, where I explored the field and its insufficient foundation in The Bahamas. After graduating in 2020, I felt unsatisfied with leaving academia with a master's degree and felt that I could do a lot more with the research, so I pursued my PhD at the same university in 2021. 
My research is driven by my love for the ocean, scuba diving, and history in The Bahamas, where I was raised on a small island with the ocean being part of my everyday life. It draws on my experiences growing up on the island and the local perspectives on how their heritage is managed within the country on a broader scale. Local disapproval of current management methods encouraged the research to find methods where the community can be included while later acknowledging the cultural heritage management's (CHM) lack of resources to assist the community's criticism.
Therefore, the goal of my PhD is to look at management methods of the community's heritage by understanding the middle ground between the CHMs and the locals based on past and current management perspectives. In order to do so, the research draws upon the knowledge of the locals on what they consider part of their maritime heritage and how they feel connected to it to understand what degree of management is suitable for their inclusion. By doing so, the research aims to create a maritime cultural heritage management framework to assist cultural heritage managers while building capacity.