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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With water covering seventy-one percent of our planet, we might wonder how much of the oceans and seas we really know, and how much archaeology there is. Seafloor surveying and exploration is in a state of continuous development, building on new technologies in recording, mapping, and analysing data. Although marine surveying techniques are well standardised nowadays and exceed expectations, we still surrender to the immensity and depth of the oceans. An example of our humanly defeat is flight MH371 which disappeared in the southern Indian Ocean. The search for this flight was one of the largest and most expensive, yet the flight’s debris was not found. Such unfortunate incidents give an impetus to push the boundaries of our current technology and enhance it.  Investigating our oceans and seas is not only of an archaeological interest, but combines many fields and disciplines, such as military applications, geology, ecology, offshore installations, seafloor mapping, etc. These podcasts for example, offer an insight on some of the current research undertaken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The increasing awareness of how little we know of our oceans, seas, and coasts, and how significant that knowledge is for all the facets of human life, particularly understanding our past, led to the establishment of numerous institutes, observatories, departments, companies, laboratories, and research units, that aim to generate, collect, analyse, consolidate, and disseminate data on our oceans and coasts. These establishments are very important and we rely much upon their work in maritime archaeology such as Channel Coastal Observatory (CCO), NOAA, SeaSearch, Ordnance Survey, European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet), Ifremer, to name but a few. Although these institutions are widespread across the globe, many regions are still under studied and that can hinder archaeological research given the lack of available data. Nonetheless, many organisations assist in filling in the gaps through the funding of projects such as the Honor Frost Foundation for the eastern Mediterranean, The European Union, the Centre for National Scientific Research, as well as governmental bodies.

With A.J. Parker (1992) identifying 1,189 shipwrecks and abandoned hulls in the Mediterranean, we can only but imagine the archaeological potential of our oceans and continental margins. Not only in terms of shipwrecks but as well as submerged sites. It has become imperative to build databases to store information and make it available to the public and to research endeavours, especially in the digital world we live in. The EMODnet portal is one of those databases, as well as Benthos (Digital Atlas of Ancient Waters), and Historic England. After all it is through the exchange of ideas and information that we can pull efforts together for the better understanding of our oceans, seas, and our past.

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These two monsoons have very different characteristics from each other, despite occurring over the same body of water. The north-easterly monsoon of the winter is characterised by dry, steady, relatively gentle winds which encourage sailing throughout its duration. Meanwhile, the south-westerly summer monsoon is wet, violent and characterised by storms and strong wind with sailing only feasible at the beginning and end; in the late spring and early autumn. Unlike in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, then, sailing in the Indian Ocean tended to avoid the summer months of June, July and August.

The switch in overall wind direction resulting from the monsoon patterns means that it is possible to sail on the Indian Ocean with a constantly favourable wind, if done in conjunction with the monsoon rhythms. Using favourable winds as much as possible was important. Ancient and medieval Indian Ocean sailing vessels could only sail to windward in lighter winds and calm seas, but were efficient when sailing with the wind. They could average as much as 11 kph on extended voyages, with an even higher top speed in very good conditions.

The use of the monsoon in this manner is inferred in Roman period written sources. One of which is the Periplus Maris Erythraei, a Greek text written in the mid-1st century AD by a merchant with intimate knowledge of the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea. The Periplus lists the ports of trade, the distances between them and the products that could and should be traded at each port. In this sense it is much more of a trading gazeteer than a description of navigational methods.

Monsoon and Ibn Majid

Our best information for using the monsoon comes from a master navigator called Ibn Majid. He came from what is now the United Arab Emirates/Oman and sailed and wrote in the 15th century. As well as describing the Arab methods of navigating using the stars, Ibn Majid recounts the routes around the Indian Ocean and lists the times of the year when vessels should depart certain ports in order to arrive safely at their destination. The constant nature of the monsoon over recent millennia means that his timetable or departures can also be used to understand earlier eras, e.g. the Roman one.

From Ibn Majid’s work, we can construct a seasonal timetable whereby ships departed from ports in the Gulf like Siraf and southwestern India during the autumn, sailing to East African ports like Zanzibar on the north-easterly monsoon and returning during the spring on the first winds of the south-westerly monsoon. Vessels from Red Sea ports like Aylah would sail south in late summer, using the tail-end of the south-westerly monsoon to sail to south-western Indian ports, returning again in December and January when they would have the favourable winds of the north-easterly monsoon. The voyage between the Red Sea and East Africa could be made using a combination of the two monsoons and a stopover at a port such as Aden in modern Yemen.

Voyages even further eastward, to south-east Asia and China, probably via the straits of Malacca, also fitted within this timetable. Vessels could leave southern India in late December, arriving in the China Sea in April or May with an arrival in Canton for the summer. The return voyage would depart in the autumn and cross the Bay of Bengal in January. A vessel sailing from a Gulf port might take a year and a half to complete the round trip to China and back.

In all the examples above, and for ancient as well as medieval eras, voyages could be made directly, or by stopping to trade at ports along the way. In this way the two monsoons provided the mariners of the Indian Ocean with a means to sail from place to place with a degree of relative certainty and reliability, arriving in specific ports at specific times, and leaving them during designated periods depending on the next destination. This regular timetable derived entirely from the combination of available sailing technology, in conjunction with the predictable monsoon weather systems. It provided a contrast to the seafaring of more northern seas where the technology was broadly similar, but where the weather was far more unpredictable.

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In the last week I’ve spent an improbably large amount of time thinking about various philosophical conceptions of maritime space. This is due partly to Monday’s British Waters and Beyond: The cultural significance of the sea since 1800 at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, and partly to my increasing obsession with sailing directions.

With our paper at the symposium on Monday and a final article out (we hope) next year, Hannah Cobb and I are coming to the end of a small philosophical adventure into maritime space.

Amid the recent material turn in the Humanities, the need to reconsider our understandings of seas and oceans has become apparent. Across the diverse philosophical conceptions deployed in disciplines from geography to law and literature, there’s a provocative tension growing between aesthetic and material imaginings of maritime space. Yet the former is proving increasingly problematic when we try to move beyond metaphor to material seas and oceans, and particularly when we want to address human habitation of watery worlds.

Hannah and I have been exploring what archaeology and anthropology can bring to this discussion. Using a little of what Jane Bennett termed, rather wonderfully, a ‘countercultural kind of perceiving’ (i.e. not anthropocentric, but attentive to things and their affects), we started with seascapes and moved quickly on to assemblages and material seas.

I’m not sure this exploration of material seas is quite over for me though, because I keep coming back to my Channel Pilot. It’s a huge volume published by the UKHO that offers sailing directions for the English Channel and its western approaches through a combination of text and charts. At 504 pages my 2005 edition is comprehensive – you couldn’t call it a handy guide. But for me it’s spellbinding because its dense bulk reflects perfectly the problem of trying to pin down the experience of sailing within a dynamic environment, where places (confluences, sandbanks and fishing grounds) shift with season, tide and weather.

Maritime geography is underpinned by real-world experience, a lived knowledge that is as much about intuiting and interpreting the world at that moment as it is about depth, current and tide. This experiential knowledge is gained through the bodily practices of wayfinding and navigation at sea and all the multisensory engagements – with currents, winds and weather and with instruments of measurement, the bodies of other sailors and the ship itself – involved in the tasks of seafaring in a weather-world.

Codifying these embodied understandings of maritime places and attempting to produce an externalised hydrography suitable for transmission via text, diagram and chart is therefore no small feat – and produces, perhaps inevitably, a hefty tome.

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