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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Don’t forget to join us next week using #FLShipwrecks

The post Summary of our second maritime archaeology Tweetchat appeared first on Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds.

During last week’s Tweetchat @agi_mv asked about the use of satellite technology in identifying submerged sites and shipwrecks. The discussion that followed ended up on the beaches of south India about 10 years ago, beaches which Julian had identified kattumaram boats on from GoogleEarth images and on which Lucy, Julian and I (along with Dr Colin Palmer, Dr Selvakumar and a handful of other fantastically patient Indian colleagues) spent some weeks recording and researching fishing boats.

@JesseRansley @rjulianw Of course. Where would romantic/adventurous cliches of maritime archaeology otherwise come from? Photo evidence? ;)

— Ági MV (@agi_mv) February 4, 2016

@agi_mv’s comment about the images that project conjured up and some of the romantic clichés of maritime archaeology got me thinking.[1]

We could probably all name a few of the clichés and visual tropes that surround maritime archaeology: the dives on intact shipwrecks in crystal blue seas; divers surfacing, breaking the waves with crucial artefacts in their hands; the technology pinging and effortlessly producing perfect surveys of exactly what is on and in the seabed.[2] Most of the time, however, it is largely about mud, mud and soggy wood if you are lucky, but definitely mud and laptops on desks in messy offices.

In maritime ethnography and ethnoarchaeology, which we’ll be discussing further in Week Four, the photographs we take are documentary. They form a core part of the project archive. They are also often a source of a different set of ‘romantic cliches’ and visual tropes: sandy beaches, rough-hewn boats, palm trees, local fishermen and boatmen, big skies… a timeless idyll or holiday paradise in which any researcher would want to work.

In the last few years, archaeologists have been increasingly interested in their project archives as an object of study in themselves. They’re no longer looked at simply as ‘neutral’ records of a project or site. We’re starting to recognise the people behind the archives – the choices that are made of what to record, what to include, what to disregard – and how those choices shape the apparently ‘neutral’ record. We’re looking for traces of the historical and social context in which they were made.[3]

Some of which might sound like a lot of navel-gazing – but it is very important to maritime ethnoarchaeology in particular. There is a lot to be found behind questions like: who is doing the recording? Who gets to choose what is important and should be photographed? How are these images used? And, who is viewing and commenting on them? And perhaps most importantly, are fishermen being recorded as ‘objects’ alongside their boats?

The assumptions we make as viewers of photographs are of particular importance. What do we see beyond boats on a beach? Do our ideas about ‘traditional fishermen’, Indian lives and culture shape what we see? What historical, social and cultural ideas do we unconsciously draw on to understand the image? Do the fishermen (or the researcher) have any say in how they are represented?

In postcolonial contexts, the power dynamics at play in idyllic images like the one above are striking. Ideas about the tensions between ‘modern’ and ‘ancient’, between urban and rural, about race, postcolonial dynamics and even economic and intellectual power, are swirling around these photos and in the ways in which we use and look at them.

This is a problem that ethnographers and maritime ethnoarchaeologists still grapple with. How can the people (researcher and fisherman alike) within the photographs be more than stereotypes? How can we make sure the people we study are able to represent themselves within our work? How can projects be collaborations, shaped by both the community and researcher?

These are complicated methodological and philosophical problems for researchers, particularly if they are interested in intangible heritage, like boat building and maritime traditions.

There’s an awful lot at stake within some of those ‘romantic’ images of maritime ethnoarchaeology.

So, in readiness for tonight’s Tweetchat (between 8-9pm tonight, #FLShipwrecks), I have a few questions for you:

• What do you think are the biggest clichés of maritime archaeology?
• Have you ever thought of any of them as destructive or dangerous?
• And, what image or photograph best sum-up maritime archaeology for you?

[1] In fact, there is a photo essay and research paper being formulated as we speak as a result – thank you @agi_mv.

[2] I’ve written about some of this from a different angle here.

[3] There was a very good ‘Archives Issue’ of the Archaeological Review from Cambridge in 2014. The introduction to the volume can be found here.

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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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