The fortunes of Southampton correlate with its maritime history. Its geographical location – on a major estuary on the English Channel coast with an unusual double high-tide, and its proximity to Winchester and London; the ancient and modern capitals of England – made the city an important regional centre for many centuries.

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Vasa is an example of a wreck that was raised first and excavated after. A team led by Per Lundström consisting of ten archaeologists, a photographer and an artist, were charged with the task. Working conditions were exceptionally harsh. The ship had to be sprayed constantly with cold, fresh water to keep it from drying out, meaning that the team had to work in an invariably wet environment. Garden hoses and spray nozzles were used to wash away the black mud covering Vasa’s decks. What was revealed was an astonishing assemblage of artefacts still lying in place.

On both gundecks, the gun carriages stood at their gun ports and the belongings of sailors were still stored in chests toward the bow. In the hold, hundreds of cannonballs were found, but also barrels of salted meat – over time reduced to bones – and huge coils of anchor cable. In the cabins, pewter plates, hunting rifles and a gilt brass table clock were found, the belongings of the officers. Perhaps the most remarkable find were the carefully folded remains of six of Vasa’s sails plus the sails for the longboat, still tied up as they had been delivered from the sailmaker in 1627. The archaeologists registered each artefact, recorded its find place and gave it a unique find number after which the object was placed in water-filled tanks to await conservation.

However, diving work also continued at the site where Vasa sunk. Many pieces of the ship had fallen off the vessel and lay around it. From 1963 to 1967 divers surveyed the site and recovered the collapsed beakhead, the upper sterncastle, parts of the foremast and mainmast, many sculptures, the ship’s anchors and the longboat, a large vessel in itself measuring 12 m long, which had another smaller boat inside it. By the time the excavation of Vasa and the diving on the site of her sinking was complete, over 40 000 objects had been registered, including almost all of the parts of the ship needed to reconstruct Vasa more or less completely, and to tell the story of the people who made up the crew.

The discovery, raising and excavation of Vasa was one of the key developments in the theory and practice of the – at that point in time – new field of maritime archaeology, primarily in Sweden, but also internationally. Together with other significant finds from the 1950s and 1960s, such as the excavation of the remains of five Viking ships found in Roskilde Fjord, Denmark, under Olaf Olsen and Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, the medieval cog discovered in the River Weser at Bremen in Germany and, on the other side of the world, the wreck of the VOC ship Batavia in Western Australia, the work on Vasa demonstrated the potential of this growing corpus of ‘underwater’ archaeological finds to produce meaningful and significant insights into our past.

The research on the history and archaeology of Vasa and the 40 000 objects found with the ship is ongoing and tackles a wide range of topics including social, environmental, economic, political and technological issues affecting the northern European world of the first half of the 17^th century. Doing this are a team of international researchers and students from – next to the conventional fields of history and archaeology – disciplines such as genetics, ballistics, metallurgy, zoology and economics. Recent projects have focused on the test firing of a replica of one of the ship’s 24-pounder bonze cannon, DNA analysis of the human remains found on the ship and inquiries into the role of woman in the Swedish economy. The research on Vasa is not just the analysis of a particular ship and how it sank, but has demonstrated to have the potential to contribute to wider technological and socio-economic questions, ranging from how the ship was built and sailed to the role of Sweden in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Sources

• Museum website: http://www.vasamuseet.se/en
• Adams, J. 2013. A Maritime Archaeology of Ships, Innovation and Social Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
• Cederlund, C. O. & Hocker, F. 2006. Vasa I: The Archaeology of a Swedish Warship of 1628. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
• Hocker, F. 2011. Vasa: A Swedish Warship. Stockholm: Medstroms Bokforlag.

The post The Warship Vasa – Part 2 appeared first on Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds.

Today, it is hard to imagine, but during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the Kingdom of Sweden was an aggressive entity – one of the great European powers – that asserted territorial control over much of the Baltic region. When Gustav II Adolf (1594-1632) acceded the Swedish throne in 1611 he inherited wars with Russia, Denmark and Poland. Gustav Adolf was the grandson of Gustav I – or Gustav Vasa as he is widely known today – the first of the Vasa dynasty. The Vasa family had a bundle of sticks, called a fascine in English and ‘vase’ in Swedish, as their heraldic symbol and it is from this that the ship Vasa gets her name.

It is in these war-like conditions that Vasa was built. In fact, out of the 21 years Gustav Adolf reigned, 18 were spent at war. The ship was commissioned in January 1625, together with three others. It was a Dutch master shipwright, Henrik Hybertsson and his business partner Arendt de Groote, who secured the contract. Vasa’s keel was laid late in the winter of 1626 at Skeppsgården, the navy yard in Stockholm. By the summer, Hybertsson, who was already sick when construction started, had to hand over supervision of the works to his assistant, Hein Jakobsson. Hybertsson, who had designed Vasa, passed away soon after.

The ship was launched in the spring of 1627 and hundreds of craftsmen worked around the clock to finish it by the summer of 1628. Although vividly decorated with hundreds of sculptures, there can be no mistake that Vasa was a war machine. The ship was 69 m long, 50 m tall from the keel to the top of the main mast, weighed over 1200 tonnes when outfitted with all ten of her sails and carried 120 tonnes of ballast. Most importantly, Vasa carried 64 cannon: 48 24-pounders that fired shot weighing ten kilograms each; eight 3-pounders on the upper deck and six stormstycken, short guns for firing anti-personnel ammunition at short range. All of that firepower added up to a broadside of 250 kilograms, twice as much as the largest ships in other northern European navies at that time.

Before the ship set sail, it was tested. The captain supervising the rigging of Vasa, Söfring Hansson, had thirty men run back and forth across the deck and noted that the ship rolled alarmingly. Despite reporting his worries to Vice Admiral Klas Fleming, who himself was feeling the pressure from the king to get the ship to sea, Söfring received orders to set sail anyway. On the 10^th of August 1628, Vasa did set sail… for 1300 metres. Thousands of Stockholm citizens and several foreign ambassadors watched while a gust of wind made the ship heel to port. Water gushed through the open gun-ports and within minutes Vasa was gone, lying 32 meters below on the sea bed.

Repeated attempts to raise the ship failed. However, 35 years later, in 1663, the divers Albrecht von Treileben and Andreas Peckell, making use of a recently perfected invention, the diving bell, managed to reach the ship, rip up the deck and extract almost all of Vasa’s guns and sold them abroad.

It was Anders Franzén who, in recent history, rediscovered the vessel in August of 1956. Divers explored the wreck and, thanks to the Baltic’s cold and fresh water which makes it inhospitable for shipworms, encountered Vasa in astonishing condition. When it was decided to lift the ship, the proposals on how to do so ranged from filling Vasa with ping-pong balls to freezing it in a giant ice-cube. Eventually, the Neptune Company opted to use a tried-and-tested method: divers spent two years digging tunnels and passing cables under the hull up to floating pontoons. On Monday the 24^th of April 1961, Vasa was again seen by a crowd of thousands when the ship broke the surface 333 years after its fatal first voyage.

Sources

• Museum website: http://www.vasamuseet.se/en
• Cederlund, C. O. & Hocker, F. 2006. Vasa I: The Archaeology of a Swedish Warship of 1628. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
• Hocker, F. 2011. Vasa: A Swedish Warship. Stockholm: Medstroms Bokforlag.

The post The Warship Vasa – Part 1 appeared first on Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds.

The Belgica,  built as the whaler Patria in 1884 in Svelvik, Norway, became Belgium’s most illustrious research vessel after it was bought and refitted by Adrien de Gerlache.

The ship and its crew were the first to spend the winter on the ice of Antartica when the ship got stuck on the 28th of February in 1898. Only 13 months later, the crew managed to dig a canal to free the ship from the ice. The Belgica arrived safely in Antwerp on the 5th of November 1899.

Transcript

Hi! I’m Thomas Dhoop and my favourite wreck has to be the Belgica. She was a Belgian research vessel.

She was built in 1883 in Norway as a whaling ship, but she was bought by Adrien de Gerlache to go on an Antarctic expedition. She left Antwerp in 1898 and successfully reached the Arctic. At the Arctic, the mission was very successful. They discovered several new biological species, discovered several new islands which they named… but she got, at a certain point, stuck in the ice and it took them 13 months to dig a canal to get them back free of the ice and so she became the first ship to spend the winter on the Antarctic. After this she was bought by the Count of Orleans and she went on several more expeditions.

During the First World War she was used as a floating fish factory and during the Second World War she was used as a floating munition depot for the British in Harstad in Norway. And this is where she met her end. She was sank by a German air attack and now she is one of the most beautiful diving spots in Norway.

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When the University of Southampton, just a couple of weeks ago, conducted the New Winchelsea Harbour Geotechnical Survey at the site of the ancient port of Winchelsea in East Sussex (United Kingdom), the recording of the ship graffiti inside St Thomas Church and in the cellar underneath Blackfriars Barn was an important part of this project. The graffiti, although admittedly very hard to date, has the potential to inform us about the sorts of ships that were docking at the harbour in Winchelsea while at the same time giving us some insight into the mindset of people in a medieval port town.

The graffiti was recorded using a technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). This method produces images in which light and shadow can be manipulated on a computer. This allows us to pick up on the minutest details. The way it works is relatively straight forward. A camera is placed on a tripod in front of the image and a mobile flash is used to take images from different lighting-angles. All of these pictures are subsequently fed into the RTI-software which builds a manipulable image.

The RTI’s of the ship graffiti from Winchelsea are still being processed and analysed, but already they are revealing some interesting insights into life at medieval Winchelsea.

The RTI-image above shows a ship lying at anchor, with two of its anchors deployed. This most likely means it is lying at a roadstead and not at a dock. This makes sense because we know Winchelsea was receiving very large ships with a deep draft, too deep for the Brede, the river at which the waterfront was located. We also have historical accounts that confirm the off-loading of tons into smaller boats for transport to the shore. Winchelsea would thus have been a harbour where lightering was a common practice.

Next to examining the structural components of the depicted ships, we can also start hypothesizing why they were carved into the columns of a church. A reasonable explanation is that they were the ‘poor man’s votive ships’. People with considerable funds could have a ship model constructed out of wood and gift it to the church to put on display. It is believed that this was done to put the journey(s) of a particular ship (or shipbuilder or merchant) under the protection of God. The Norwegian maritime archaeologist Christer Westerdahl has recently suggested that the carved images found in Nordic churches had the same purpose. It is not unlikely that this was also the case in Winchelsea.

If this interpretation is true, it gives us a wonderful insight into the mindset of people living in coastal towns in the middle ages. The fact that they felt the need to place a voyage across the sea under the protection of God does not only show the religious character of life at that time, but also the way maritime activities were inextricably interwoven with religion. Today, they are a permanent reminder to residents and visitors alike that at one point in time, Winchelsea’s inception and success was dependent on the ships floating in the Brede, something which is easily forgotten in a town that today is about two kilometres away from the nearest coastline.

More details on the ship graffiti recorded in Winchelsea will become available on my research blog over the next few weeks.

If you are interested in RTI, the software to make your own RTI-images is available for free on the website of Cultural Heritage Imaging.

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Learners on our MOOC ‘Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds’ will already be familiar with our shipwrightery workshop at Buckler’s Hard in Hampshire (United Kingdom) through the steps on experimental archaeology and medieval seafaring in week 2. One of the main objectives of this workshop is for our students to use the tools of the trade and produce the tool marks they will be asked to interpret in their professional lives.

What occurred to us a couple of months ago was that there is no such thing as a ‘reference collection’ for tool-marks. When worked timber is found, a handful of expert are available with the expertise to interpret them. A reference collection of tool marks would allow students and professionals alike to compare the tool marks on the archaeological timbers they find with the ones recorded in the reference collection to make an educated assessment of which tool was used to produce those marks. The workshop at Buckler’s Hard provided an ideal opportunity to produce tool marks in a controlled environment with known tools and to start such a collection.

Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) was used to record the markings. This is a technique that produces images in which light and shadow can be manipulated on a computer and is an excellent way to accentuate low surface topographies on flat surfaces. This allows us to pick up on the minutest details. The way it works is relatively straightforward. A camera is mounted on a tripod in front of the surface and a mobile flash is used to take images from different lighting-angles. All of the pictures are subsequently fed into the RTI-software which builds a manipulable image.

The two images above are snapshots of RTI-images. The first one shows adzing marks, while the second shows axe marks produced by a replica Viking Age hatchet. Tool marks like these, in the first place, inform us about the tools that were used to produce ship timbers and the craftsmanship involved. Furthermore, we hope it will be possible to compare tool marks produced by ancient shipwrights to those of carpenters. Did they use similar tools and did they handle them in similar ways? Were carpenters one and the same or did they move around in different communities of practice? And how does this develop over time? These are just some of the questions we hope to answer in the long-term.

The reference collection is currently under construction and will go live this summer on the website maritimearchaeology.com.

If you are interested in exploring RTI further, the necessary software if available for free through Cultural Heritage Imaging.

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As learners active on our MOOC ‘Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds’ have learned during week 1, maritime archaeology does not always necessarily take place underwater. What we study is human engagement with the seas and the oceans and often, the evidence for this engagement is now to be found on land. One area that is of specific interest to me are harbour-sites, the interface between land and water par excellence, and the stage for a lot of human activity.

Only a couple of weeks ago, the University of Southampton conducted a survey at the ancient harbour site of Winchelsea in East Sussex (United Kingdom). Winchelsea, refounded in the 1280’s after severe coastal erosion of its original site, was a major planned royal port. Until its decline from the middle of the 14^th century, the town was an important member of the Cinque Ports confederation and one of the principal international ports of the English realm.

Perhaps surprisingly, even though it was the very reason for its existence, very little is known about Winchelsea’s waterfront and the survey was the first step in rectifying this lacuna. Due to the silting of the harbour, what was once a fairly large river canal, is now a small stream. This does mean however, that a substantial part of the ancient port might be preserved underneath some of the fields just north of the Winchelea hill.

A variety of methods were deployed to survey the fields underneath which the port is thought to be located, some of which you will familiarize yourself with in week 3. The results of the survey are still being processed and interpreted, but we can already reveal a sneak preview here.

At the location where private waterfront plots are thought to have been located, anomalies were found at right angles to one another. Current thinking is that these are drainage ditches dug to clear the water to subsequently build something more structural there. This would correspond well with how these plots are described in the surviving Rental of 1292 which describes them as ‘perilous at all flowings of the tide’.

The second field is more of an enigma. Three separate anomalies were found that are of interest. In the southwest corner, two ditches seem to run at a right angle to one another. Perhaps these are foundation-ditches for some sort of structure that was built there, but this is pure speculation so far. In the very northern end of the field, possibly something structural was found. This might be a storehouse known from mid-to-late-sixteenth century historical records. However, also this must remain speculative without excavation. Finally, between these two features, a fairly large ditch was dug, either for drainage or sewage. More information on the survey will become available on my research blog over the coming weeks.

If you want to learn more about Winchelsea, David and Barbara Martin wrote an excellent book summarizing most historical and archaeological work in 2004 while David Martin and David Rudling compiled most excavations in the town up until the year 2000.

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The interpretation of shipwrecks can be a complicated matter and is often performed by specialists within the discipline (sometimes called ‘nautical archaeologists’). However, even these specialists can use all the help they can get. Who better to assist and teach them than the boat builders that are still building wooden boats today?

A couple of weeks ago, the 8^th annual ‘Faro Rhino Archaeological User Group’ or FRAUG conference took place in Baltimore, Ireland. This year’s organiser, Pat Tanner, a traditional boat builder, 3D scanning expert and PhD researcher at the University of Southampton took it on himself to organise a week of boat building at Hegarty’s traditional boatyard.

For an entire week, a group of maritime archaeologists from a variety of countries thought about how design could have been translated into wood. To kick things off and get into the right state of mind, Juan Pablo Olaberria and Thomas Dhoop of the University of Southampton gave a presentation on the design and construction of Viking Age ships.

The next few days, it was time to put what we as experts write about into practice. Could we actually build a boat? At Hegarty’s shipyard, six keels with stem and stern were ready-made for us. The challenge was to construct a clinker-built boat of about 3,5m (12 feet) long and 1,2m (ca. 4 feet) wide. Two of the boats were to be built with U-shaped moulds, the remaining three without. The moulds are used to bend the planks to shape. This helps to control the final shape of the boat. Several traditional boat builders were on hand to offer (a minimum of) advice and guidance. By Thursday, much to the archaeologist’s and boat builders’ surprise, using a variety of different methods and techniques, every team had built a ‘boat’.

The shapes of the boats differed radically and was largely determined by the techniques that the teams decided to use. One of the teams did not use a mould and decided to use the raw material, 20cm (8 inch) wide planks in their entirety. The boat therefore took the shape that the pliability of the planks would allow it to take, something which resembled a canoe. Another team did use a mould and reduced the planks to half of their original width. This allowed them to put a lot more curvature into the planks while bending them against the mould which consequently resulted in a more flat-bottomed boat.

Engaging with boat building and traditional boat builders in this manner provided valuable insights for us maritime archaeologists. Every tool leaves a certain mark on planks and other parts of a boat. When recorded and interpreted properly, these markings can tell us if a plank was sewn or cleaved, fastened to another plank or a frame, if treenails or nails were used, and so on. Sometimes, the shipwright will even leave instructions for an apprentice such as the places where a hole should be drilled or where the overlap between planks should end. Recognising these tool-marks is an important part of the interpretation of ancient boats. Physically wielding the tools that leave these markings and producing them ourselves while building the boats turned out to be by far the best way to learn how to ‘read’ the marks that the ancient boat builders left for us.

With their wealth of practical experience, boat builders can often advise archaeologists on how to interpret certain tool-marks and can provide valuable insights in how a boat might have been  conceived and constructed. However, as archaeologists we should also be aware of the fact that every craftsman will speak from the biased perspective of his own ‘tradition’. A wooden boat builder in Baltimore, Ireland will use a different set of techniques and will construct differently shaped boats than a wooden boat builder in western Norway. This is because, over generations of knowledge being passed down from master to apprentice, boat builders in different places have developed different habits. They developed different ways of doing things which they all consider to be ‘the right way’. We have to keep in mind that, the solutions modern wooden boat builders come up with to solve certain practical problems might not be the same as boat builders in the past would have.

Thomas Dhoop

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SCUBA dive shop owners who have been in business since the 1970s all share first-hand the devastating impact the 1975 release of the blockbuster summer film ‘Jaws’ had on their business.  Almost 4 decades later, most of us have seen this iconic film and if honest, confess its impact on our own ‘healthy’ (or unfortunately, misinformed unhealthy!) fear of sharks.  At the end of the movie, Chief Martin Brody (played by Roy Schneider) manages to blow Jaws to bits by shooting a common SCUBA dive cylinder (presumably fully charged with air) lodged in Jaw’s mouth.

Haskell W. O’Brien III, a Systems Administrator for the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO has a fun blog where he has done the maths that estimates the potential energy from the pressure of an air-fill inside a common SCUBA dive cylinder.  A fully charged 230 bar (3336 psi) 12 litre (86 cubic feet of compressed gas) scuba cylinder maintains approximately 1,242,000 joules of potential energy.  A joule is ‘1 watt of electrical power for one second.’ O’Brien goes on to explain that 1,232,200 joules is enough wattage to run two 1500 watt hair driers for 7 minutes each.  That doesn’t sound so impressive in it of itself.  However, when compared to O’Brien’s calculations of the potential energy of TNT, the release of 1,242,000 joules in an instant in time would equate to the detonation of about 300 grams of TNT.  Again, sounds like a 4^th of July firework; surely nothing dangerous? Until you realize that a hand grenade contains ‘composition B’ explosive equivalent to approximately 150 grams of TNT.  Therefore, assuming the bullet from Chief Brody’s gun caused a catastrophic failure of the cylinder and completely ruptured it in an instant, the explosive energy released would have been the equivalency of not one but TWO hand grenades going off at once inside Jaw’s mouth! Yep…more than enough destructive power to make fish chowder out of him.

When an ordinary SCUBA dive cylinder is full, the pressure from the compressed air inside is roughly equal to the pressure water exerts on an object 1.5 miles deep in the ocean.  In short, the air inside the cylinder has been compressed to tremendous pressure!  To reduce that pressure to something safe and ‘usable’ in the dive environment we add a ‘1st stage regulator’ to the cylinder valve.  The 1^st stage steps this pressure down to approximate 5/100’s of the cylinder’s fill pressure. In other words 95% is safely held back by the 1^st stage and only a steady 11 BAR (160 psi) is released to the regulator mouthpiece we breathe from.  The mouth piece further steps down the pressure to ‘ambient pressure’ (the pressure of the surrounding water we find ourselves in) and allows us to safely and easily take a normal breath at any depth.

A high-end (expensive!) and finely-tuned mouthpiece will release air into our lungs at just a tad higher than ambient water pressure resulting in making it exceptionally easy to breath under water. Imagine being entirely weightless… completely suspended in animation without having to flex a single muscle in your body (like an astronaut). Now proceed to take a breath and even your diaphragm muscle that enables you to breathe receives a ‘slight assist’ from a mechanical device! It is the most peaceful relaxing state of being you will ever experience and this relaxed and peaceful feeling is one of the joys of recreational scuba diving.

However, does maritime archaeological diving mimic the lovely picture I’ve just painted ?  Generally speaking….NO!  In my experience, archaeological divers always seem to find themselves in one of two scenarios:  1) either diving in wonderfully easy dive conditions (like warm clear calm water… a recreational diver’s vacation dream spot) but task-loaded with difficult objectives and the added emotional pressure to ‘accomplish those objectives’ and please/impress the project leader, or 2) given the ‘simplest task’ and then expected to perform it in the WORST diving conditions imaginable!

I recall a dive in 7 meters (23 ft) depth in the Solent in 2014 off the Isle of Wight in the English Channel on the HMS Invincible wreck site.  Project Director Dan Pascoe of Pascoe Archaeological Service gave me and my dive buddy our dive briefing wile anchored on site in a little RIB (rigid inflatable boat…rubber ‘blow up’ boat).  Dan explained: “We’re anchored just off the wreck here…shot line has been deployed (heavy weighted rope with a large float at the top) to descend and ascend on… you’ve got your  water proof laminated map of the site. There are 16 control stakes on the map stuck in the sand about 70 meters apart in total spread.  Go find them and measure each with a tape measure from tip-to-sand and record the measurements on your slate.  Be back in an hour or less. Any questions?”  Now to be fair, I am a certified SCUBA dive instructor with a specialty rating certified to teach ‘Underwater Navigation.’ I have dove the Solent and dove the Invincible site before so I’m both familiar and comfortable.  (There was nothing inappropriate about the brevity of Dan’s briefing for this site formation process sediment deposition measurement dive objective.) However, navigating by map and compass across the better part of a football field-sized area underwater when visibility is reduced to 2 meters (6 feet) compounded with massive amounts of seaweed carried by the Solent’s strong and unusual ‘double tide’ cross-current (that fully changed direction within the hour long dive!) puts your underwater navigation skills to the test! (I found 15 and got measurements on 14.  I was a little disappointed in myself but he seemed pleased.

I find that underwater archaeology requires only common recreation dive skills, but those skills must be honed to a very high degree of proficiency.  Archaeological divers must remain horizontal (like a fish…you never see a fish upright in the water, do you?) with PERFECT buoyancy skills.  Practice laying on a picnic table– lay horizontally flat on your belly, bend your knees, arch your back ever so slightly, and get those feet and fins up in the air, because you’ve got to be able to maintain that position in the water at depth for 40 minutes or more while operating water/air dredge excavation equipment (those ‘suction tube’ things that suck all the mud off the wreck site.)

A final word about sharks.  It is very rare to see them.  You could spend a whole life time recreationally diving and never see one.  One of my mentors taught me “You wanna see a shark? Be the first one off the boat and immediately stick your face in the water and scan out away from the boat… you might get lucky and catch a glimpse of one quickly swimming away.”  To be fair, there are places where you’ll find them but almost never on archaeological dive sites where equipment is in use and team dive ops are under way.  On those exceptionally rare occasions when I have found myself in the presence of a curious bull shark in Florida waters, I do what an old commercial fisherman boat captain taught me years ago… “Ya don’t swim towards him, ya don’t swim away from him, and ya don’t turn your back on him. Just let him know by your calm purposed behavior that you are neither a threat nor his next meal.” 

David J. Selmo
MSc Maritime Archaeology (Distinction)
University of Southampton
Email: mos11b1p@hotmail.com

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Currently, I am undertaking Ph.D. research on the impact of maritime commerce and trade on urban development in 12th to 14th century northern Europe at the University of Southampton. On this project, I am collaborating with the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde (Denmark).

My main research focuses on the impact of medieval commerce and seafaring on urban topology in northern Europe. Next to this, I study the construction and design principles underpinning clinker-built ships and the preservation and dissemination of (shipbuilding) knowledge. Another interest of mine lies in the study of Bronze Age connectivity, where I am currently focussing on the relationships between the peoples of the Scheldt and Leie basins (Belgium) and their neighbours across the Channel.

If you would like to read more about my research you can follow me on my Maritime Archaeology Blog.

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