We are hoping to run Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds again at the end of January 2017, but in the meantime these are some of the MOOCs that might be of interest to you:

Archaeology

• Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the lost harbour of Ancient Rome. (University of Southampton).
• Fundamentals of GIS.
• The European discovery of China.
• Archaeology: From dig to lab and beyond.
• Hadrian’s Wall: Life on the Roman frontier.
• Homo Floresiensis uncovered: the science of ‘the Hobbit’.
• Superpowers of the Ancient World: the Near East.
• Antiquities trafficking and art crime.
• Cultural heritage, social innovation and new citizenship.
• Recovering humankind’s past and saving the universal heritage
• Roman Art and Archaeology
• The Mediterranean, a space of exchange (from the Renaissance to Enlightenment).

History

• Greek and Roman Mythology.

Marine science

• Exploring our oceans. (University of Southampton)
• Marine Life 101.
• Sharks! Global biodiversity, biology and conservation.
• Tropical Coastal Ecosystems.
• Marine and antarctic science.

Environmental issues

• Causes of climate change.
• Coasts and Communities.
• Our Earth’s Future.
• The Dynamic Earth.
• Sensing planet earth – water and ice.
• Introduction to water and climate.
• Climate change.
• Contemporary issues in ocean governance.
• Water in a thirsty world.
• Climate justice: lessons from the global south.

Providers of MOOCs

What’s on offer changes all the time, so here are the main providers that you might want to explore.

• FutureLearn.
• Blackboard Coursesites.
• Canvas network.
• Coursera.
• EdX.
• EMMA.
• Iversity.
• Novoed.
• Open2Study.
• Openlearning.
• Stanford Online.
• Udacity.

Are there any free online courses that you can recommend to others? Have you tried any of the courses listed above? Which ones did you enjoy? Are there any you disliked?

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We’ve made as many of the course videos as possible available on our YouTube channel and are hoping to crowd-source translations.

It’s very easy for you to do. Just submit subtitles in any language other than English. We’ll check them, hopefully approve them and then make them available to any learner.

How to submit your translation

YouTube guide on how to contribute closed captions and subtitles

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As part of the Festival of British Archaeology, Archaeology here at Southampton will be hosting a day of hands-on activities and demonstrations on Saturday 23rd July.

We are planning lots for everyone to do, take part in and/or watch, including:

• Prehistoric butchery
• Medieval shipwrighting using our axe collection
• Cave art
• Human bones
• Prehistoric metallurgy demonstration
• Flint knapping and axe making
• Mini-excavation
• Build-a-burial
• Geophysics
• Human Origins and a chance to meet the monkey men!
• Minecraft
• Maritime archaeology

Events will be running from 10am to 4pm at Avenue Campus (just off Highfield Road, SO17 1BF – plenty of parking available onsite).

Free entry!

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We hope you have enjoyed the third run of the Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds course. We are very pleased that you spent some time with us learning about maritime heritage. The Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) is a wonderful experience for us as well as it not only gives us the chance to explore areas of maritime archaeology that we don’t always see in our day to day work but allows us the chance to talk to you!

It would be very useful if you could take a few minutes to complete the exit survey for the course. It will help us continue to improve the MOOC and give us valuable information on how education can change public perception of maritime heritage. We want to see how how your thoughts have changed over the four weeks you’ve spent learning with us!

There are only ten questions in this survey. Please feel free to fill in as much or as little of the survey as you wish – and to let us know exactly what you think!

To take survey simply follow this link: https://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/18736

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As part of ongoing research at the Centre for Maritime Archaeology Research Group (CMARG) on public perception of maritime heritage, we hope that you might take ten minutes or so to complete the following survey: 10 minute pre-course survey on maritime heritage.

This information helps the MOOC team better understand how to improve the course and tailor both it and blog posts to your interests.  As well, it helps several doctoral students better understand how people around the world relate to the sea and their maritime heritage.  Your participation is much appreciated!

Here is that link again: 10 minute pre-course survey on maritime heritage

The post Your help is needed! Please complete a 10 minute pre-course survey on maritime heritage appeared first on Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds.

Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds educator, Dr Julian Whitewright, will be giving a talk on maritime archaeology at Southampton Cafe Scientifique:

Introduction to ship archaeology, metallurgical analysis of copper/brass material for dating, dendrochronology, conservation and so on

Date: Monday 8th February 2016
Time: 19:00 for talk 19:30 to 21:00.
Venue: Southwestern Arms (upstairs room) , 36 Adelaide Rd, St Denys, Southampton, SO17 2HW
Cost: Entry by a purchase at the bar or by donation in the tin, for the venue facilities.

There will be plenty of time for questions and answers, so please feel free to come along with your queries.

This event is relatively informal, so it will not be possible for it to be live-streamed.

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The training at Ulster University was for three days. One day of familiarising with the equipment and the survey area, a day of surveying, and a day of data processing. We were quite lucky with good weather, surprisingly for Ireland. Kieran had chosen the survey area for the training at Lough Beg, Northern Ireland, where a log boat is supposedly located in the vicinity of a crannog in the lake. We surveyed around the crannog following or trying to follow pre-determined survey lines in as much as the wind, current, and depth of the lake allowed. Since the purpose of the survey was to collect side scan sonar data, it was necessary to reduce the noise from the motor. We ended up surveying on a speed of 2-3 knots, realising that the data we were collecting was not the best, but it was good enough for the training exercise. The shallow parts of the lake were quite difficult to survey. We did get to see many posts showing up on the display unit and lots of vegetation which was also getting stuck to the motor’s propeller.

The survey was followed by a day of data processing using ReefMaster and SonarTRX. The former software allows to quickly review the data, locate anomalies, and generate a bathymetric map. The SonarTRX on the other hand is used to process the data by editing the lines of surveys one by one in order to get the best results from the collected data. It then permits to generate a mosaic from the survey lines which can be imported into GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Working through the software took almost a whole day, familiarising with the tools, editing, and exporting capabilities. We tend to assume that once the data is collected, the hard part is over, but in fact processing the data is much more demanding, it is a science and an art (quoting both Kieran Westley and Rorey Quinn). The nice mosaics and images we see often in marine geophysics are the result of long hours of computational work by dedicated individuals.

Finally, this training was concluded with a visit to the Giant’s Causeway, a walk along the incredible Irish coastline, a visit to a local pub, and good times with good people, all thanks to the Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Ulster, particularly Dr Kieran Westley and Dr Colin Breen, and to the Honor Frost Foundation for their support.

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Hello and welcome to Week Four. This is a question and answer session which normally we have lots of the facilitators and educators here altogether in the same room, but this week lots people are out in the field and so what we’re going to do is record a few question individually and hopefully we can then answer them in the same way that we did last week.

So, the first question I’m going to answer is about Tybrind Vig and a question came in about why we think they had hearths on the canoes found at Tybrind Vig.

I think this is a really, really interesting question because the most obvious answer, of course, is that people wanted to transport fire from place to place. You know it’s really, really difficult to light a fire and you’re not going to just let it go out if you could possibly transport it and save yourself the effort. So, from moving from one settlement to another, for example, from the summer settlement to the winter settlement or a different activity zone you would take that fire with you.

However, there have been lots of different hypotheses that have been put forward. Another one is that people perhaps needed it for warmth whilst on board longer journeys and for cooking fish. We can see this in ethnographic accounts, for example, the aboriginals in Australia quite often use fires on board bark canoes and they use that for cooking and for warmth as well when doing longer trips and we have archaeological evidence to support this from and late Neolithic site in Scandinavia which has a hearth on board the log boat and in this hearth we have charcoal, but we also have burnt fish remains as well so we know that people were cooking fish on these fires.

Another hypothesis was put forward by Anderson which suggested that perhaps these fires were used as fishing lures and you can see fishing lures and lights being used at night for eel-fishing in the same region, so it’s quite a possible hypothesis.

Another question that’s been put forward is why were these boats abandoned?

Now obviously this is something we just don’t really know. But, I think I would wonder whether this is something to do with the changing climate, changing environment because there’s lots of effort put into these boats and if you imagine a 10 metre long boat, you wouldn’t just abandon it for no reason. So perhaps the region slowly began to silt up. We know it was a lagoon, it was a muddy sort-of-lagoonal area, perhaps the conditions were just slowly changing and it just wasn’t viable to use them any more. Or perhaps the people were just moving to a different area and they got left there. So, we just don’t know.

Week 3

3.3 Sea-level change

Catherine Emmitt (retired teacher from the UK): Where [are] we in the Milankovic cycles now?

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5777725

3.5 Exploring sea-level change

Ariana Bachechi (Chicago, Il, USA): Out of curiosity, I also looked at the maps near the African Great Lakes region and was surprised to see that there is no evidence of them even as early as 6,000 years ago. I was under the impression that they were formed due to tectonic shifts, which will eventually disconnect the horn of Africa. I thought this was an old, and very long, process. Does anyone have more information about how they were formed and when they first appeared?

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5782322

Week 4

4.5 Studying maritime traditions and skills

Richard Yoast: Can anyone recommend sources that focus on the use of decoration and the arts (sculpture, painting, weaving) in shipbuilding?

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5893768

4.7 Tybrind Vig, Denmark (5400-4000cal BC)

Astrid Niemann Jorgenson: I wonder why some of these boats were abandoned, wear or just general damage? Also, why was it necessary to transport fire from place to place?

Simon Hodgson: Question that pops into my head; when would gold have first been recognised as an important substance of high status and value? Presumably early on in humanity’s existence, there wouldn’t have been much need or time for pretty trinkets.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5899408

4.8 Cape Gelidonya, Turkey (1200BC)

Susan Brett: Marine archaeologists ought to make their work more widely known through television, instead of leaving the broadcast hours to Odyssey Marine.

4.9 The Grace Dieu, England (1439)

How did University of Southampton purchase Grace Dieu for £5?

4.12 UNESCO Convention

Sarah Williams: Can one of the team explain why neither the US and the UK have not signed the Convention? Shame on them.

4:16 Professional, amateur or archaeology for all?

Gordon Dyne: Is it just me or is there an almost evangelical zeal to some of these articles ?

The post Questions on Week 4 appeared first on Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds.

Charles Weager (Blackwater, Yateley, Hampshire, UK): I find it interesting that a simple method of changing the sail shape existed. That they could head to within 60degrees of the wind is fascinating. Was this technology available to Medieval ships? Is it lost technology? I had always understood that until the use of Lanteen (Triangular) sails that shipping was seriously restricted hence the need to rely on the trade winds for ocean navigation. Even the shipping along the Indian ocean coasts depended on the prevailing monsoons because of the undeveloped sail technology. Yachting still does, anyone sailing from Europe to the Americas will head south to the Azores or the Canaries before heading West on a favourable wind.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5572143

2.12 Navigation and trade

Astrid Niemann Jorgensen: What did Mariners do when they got blown off course?

3.2 Our changing seas

Alastair Mellor: Are the affects of man taken into account? For example a vast area of the Netherlands is reclaimed from the sea and in England the area of the Wash is smaller than it was in medieval times (due in part to Dutch engineers). Are there many landbased shipwreck hunters? https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5727917

3.2 Our changing seas

Christine Scates: I hope this isn’t a silly question but in the video it mentions the volume of sea water being affected. How is this measured? https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5637433

3.11 Marine geophysics for submerged landscape investigations

Does Southampton use the Kray computers at Bracknall for seismic interpretation or have their own?

3.8 Geophysical techniques for maritime archaeology

Valerie Naylor: Are submerged worlds protected from, for example, the placing of wind turbines or oil rigs? If a developer discovers archaeological remains during exploration, are they obliged to report them? And if so, are archaeologists given a time window in which to assess the site or can a preservation order be placed on it, as on land?

3.13 Archaeological methods for submerged landscape investigations

When talking of hand axes & the like found in river gravel deposits. Is it possible that these early peoples made offerings to their gods as has been found in much later sites such as Flag Fen?  JACKI HART

3.16 Case study on marine geophysical surveys: the SS Richard Montgomery wreck

Lots of questions about the safety of the SS Richard Montgomery and how make wreck sites with ammo safe!

The post Questions on Week 3 appeared first on Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds.

Like last week, we’ve got a selection of team members (Fraser, Thomas and Rodrigo) together in an informal setting to try to answer some of the questions that learners have asked this week. A few of them are ones that were posted in Week 1 after our last video, but most of them are from Week 2.

Questions carried over from Week 1

1.10 History of maritime archaeology

Richard Yoast (Chicago and Santa Fe, USA): Is there much interaction and collaboration between the Maritime Archaeology team and those working on Portus? If so what has been learned from such a collaboration. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5493449

1.13 The development of a discipline

Peter Probert (West Sussex, UK): I’ve often wondered about a related aspect to the salvage/treasure hunting aspect, which is what is the protection in place vis-a-vis UK ships which have been sunk in international waters? Eg, HMS Repulse was sunk in the South China Sea with large loss of life, but the UK legislation appears to cover UK waters only. Is there anything else in place to help protect against salvage operators, professional or amateur, in this respect? https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5540654

1.15 The earliest seafarers

Emily Ginder (Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA): How do we know the following: “The first secure evidence of seafaring in the Mediterranean comes from the 11th- 10th millennium BC in the form of obsidian from the island of Melos found in Franchthi cave in Greece.” How can you rule out a later time, like a traveler bringing home a souvenir from his travels?’ https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5512413

Questions relating to Week 2:

2.4 Ships, shipbuilding and sailing in the ancient Mediterranean

Wendy Cooper: Do we have any evidence when/how ship building developed from ‘one man building his boat’ to the sophisticated types of craft seen by Roman times? https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5570192

2.8 Medieval seafaring

Loftsman: I am loving this course and very informative as well, although i still would like an answer of when saws started to be used for the cutting of planks in the shipbuilding process, splitting of planks by wedge while effective left so much finishing work to be done by axe or adze while the two man saw was the technological advance for the time I guess. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5622680

2.3 Late Bronze Age Trade in Eastern Mediterranean

Debbie Wareham (Tal Y Cafn, North Wales): Really enjoyed reading the article. International trade during the late Bronze Age, and the role that Cyprus played in the production of Copper is really interesting. I was wondering tho’ about trade with Britain and export of Copper from here at that time – such as the Great Orme Copper Mines in Llandudno, North Wales? It has always been of interest to understand where the local smelting sites were, and how did they export the copper ore? As I understand, there was some small scale local smelting carried out of low grade copper ore, the rest was exported. The coastline was much further out during those times than today, and there are ancient tree remains on the beaches, so boat building was possible. Also of interest, was the exchange of ideas to develop copper mining in the first instance – was there a steady movement of people and ideas who knew how to identify a source of copper within an area? https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5595052

2.13 A new technology: from clinker to carvel

John Higham (Wigton, Cumbria): Is it possible that clinker-building, resulting in less rigid hulls, produced ships more suited to the larger waves that were more common in northern and Atlantic waters? https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5623184

2.2 The Classical World

Dave Hall (London Kent borders, UK): From this introduction it seems that the course focus is on the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and I am wondering about open water links with Britain. I am aware of two Bronze Age ships that have been found in Britain and I suspect that there were regular shipping routes between Britain and Europe. There were links between Britain and Europe in the Iron Age but I am not if any ships have been found. These links definitely existed in the Roman period but I am not aware of the types of ships used. Therefore I would be interested to know if these ships were the same as those used in other areas or were they different. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5537341

2.26 Mid course review – we want to hear from you

Gwendolyn Yaegar: Wow, I love this course. The way each subject is backed by a video and article is particularly valuable because there are times where I’m doing the course but can’t see the video. Also, I’ve had the opportunity to share some of these videos in one of my classes, Ancient and Medieval History. I’m going to be teaching a lesson on marine archaeology next week and I was wondering if you had any tips for me or could do a brief summary of the most interesting aspects of the course to a high schooler.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/shipwrecks-2/comments/5634416

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