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?

The post Other free online courses (MOOCs) that may be of interest to you appeared first on Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds.

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.

The ever-changing nature of the inter-tidal zone means that is presents its own unique set of challenges as a working environment. This is especially true in countries such as the UK where there is a very large tidal range. The extent of the inter-tidal zone is increased, but the time-window during which archaeological remains are accessible can be very limited. The nature of the inter-tidal zone around the UK is also very mixed, ranging from vast expanses of hard sand, to estuarine silts and mud. Working on sites in the latter is like working in a vat of treacle or thick syrup, but with a much worse taste and an enduring smell that clings to you long after you have left the site!

Accessing sites in these areas can be fraught with difficulty and real danger of literally becoming stuck in the mud in the face of a rapidly incoming tide. Knowledge of the local conditions is therefore of critical important, as is a pair of tight fitting wellies, or even a dry suit. Reaching a site might involve a significant walk, carrying all equipment, although options to make life easier include hovercraft or even arrival by boat on estuarine islands. Developing technology using drones for remote surveys and photographic recording is also making life much easier.

Finally, when the site is reached, its location within the tidal regime might dictate that work is limited to a very short window, perhaps 45 minutes if located near to the low water mark. I was lucky enough to work on a newly exposed site on the East Winner sandbank, Hampshire, which was a well preserved 19th century shipwreck, but where we could only access the site for one hour, every two weeks, not at all convenient. On other sites that are situated closer to the high tide line work can carry on for hours. The location of the site in the tide can also mean that access is only available every few weeks at the lowest tides, which can be a further impediment to regular work.

Given all of these problems, the question might be asked as to why we bother to work in such an area. The answer is simple – because the archaeological remains that are contained there are often fantastically preserved by mud, silt and sand. By extension, they are often remains that have never been recorded before (because of being covered) and so offer new information to add to our overall record. At a more visual level, such sites can be incredibly evocative as they emerge from the receding waters, and exist in our world for a limited period of time before they are reclaimed by the incoming tide. This constantly changing physical context offers the final reason for working in the intertidal zone – that many of the sites that are found, are under immediate threat when they appear, from sediment erosion or being swept away by the sea.

The importance of archaeological remains in the intertidal zone is being increasingly recognised within the UK. The nature of the sites means that it is often possible to visit them in person, or to volunteer to help with the survey and recording of them. Much of this work takes place in a very reactive way, because sites are often uncovered and exposed without warning, and so work cannot be planned in advance. So if you are interested in learning more about intertidal archaeology please visit the websites of the Maritime Archaeology Trust, or the CITiZAN Project.

You may also be interested in What are the environments that maritime archaeologists work in? which is a step in Week 1 of Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds: Maritime Archaeology.

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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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Core samples can be gathered from all over the world. Here, core samples are being taken from an intertidal site at Somerset.

They can be removed from the ground using a variety of techniques; either hand powered or mechanical in nature. We can take them from dry land, inter-tidal and underwater contexts.

Once removed from the site they are taken to the BOSCORF (British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility) Core store at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton. Here they are split in half. One section becomes an archive to be stored for later researchers, the other the ‘working’ section. Once split the core can be recorded; noting the change in sediments, colour and inclusions.

This core is over 10,000 years old and is from the southern North Sea and shows an old riverbed at the base, covered by a wetland system and then a slow shift through the development of an estuary before finally becoming fully inundated by the sea.

It is also possible to use more advanced technology to examine the cores. At the university of Southampton we have one of the few ITRAX machines that is able to take extremely high-resolution images, as well as x-rays and xRF data. The x-rays allow us to see variation in the density of core material, and to pick out microstructures not visible to the eye. The xRF data gives detail on the variation of chemical elements in the core.

Once examined, the cores are stored in a temperature control storage area. As you can see we have thousands of cores, from all over the world giving us a wealth of crucial archaeological data.

If you enjoyed this, you might like this article about how core samples can be used.

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When one thinks of maritime archaeology, the first images conjured up are those of shipwrecks, and maybe harbours and submerged landscapes, but (perhaps for fairly obvious reasons) rarely of submerged aircraft, and yet aircraft and all things maritime do share common ground, both literally and theoretically.

In one sense, the differences between aviation and maritime archaeology seem clear and well-defined. Aircraft are designed to travel through a different medium than boats, and their contact with the sea is usually either transitory or unplanned. Knowledge of how to understand an underwater aircraft wreck is rooted outside in a different context to which it is found, the sources of which usually lie in non-maritime related areas. Crashed aircraft can be (and have been) found literally anywhere, and therefore their appearance on the seabed is merely one of chance.

However, when one looks a little deeper, the overlaps between aviation and maritime archaeology become clear, even obvious. Aircraft carriers are a clear example of maritime craft, yet one whose entire raison d’etre is beholden to aircraft, and a knowledge of aircraft is critical to understanding them. When aircraft were first being built at the beginning of the 20^th century, the common ground of creating a vessel designed to go through a hostile medium meant that boat builders were often involved. Perhaps not unrelated to this is the sharing of nomenclature – rudders, propellers, stringers, frames, spars, cockpit, the use of port and starboard are all common terms to both areas. The line between aviation and maritime archaeology becomes even more blurred when flying boats are considered, a vessel that has a keel, a hull, portholes, is neutrally buoyant and in the early days of aviation at least, when wood was still the material of choice, could be either carvel or clinker-built. Additionally, their natural home when not in the air being on the water meant that flying boats were usually built in yards adjoining waterways, so that they could be launched down the slipway when complete.

Theoretical concerns aside, there are a huge number of aircraft (mainly military) to be found underwater globally, and this shared medium means that the maritime archaeologist will often encounter aircraft, whether by accident or design. A working knowledge of aircraft and the attendant issues of finding them, not least the legal regimen and the issue of human remains, is essential for the modern maritime archaeologist.

Want to learn more? Click here!

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Invincible’s outer planking is significantly thick; more resembling ‘timbers’ than planks.  These huge planks were held to the frame timbers by cylindrical billets (‘trenails’) that were hand-hewn with a draw knife to a dowel shape, split at one end, and then driven with a mallet through a pre-bored hole that went clear through the planking into the frame member.  Once the trenail was driven flush pinning the plank to the frame, it was then secured with a wedge of hardwood (usually English Oak) in much the same fashion an iron hammer head is secured to a Hickory handle.

Carrying a Fuji Finepix F200EXR auto-focusing underwater camera, a Bembo Trekker Mk3 tripod, a Diverite 15w 1000 lumen HID wreck diving light, and a Cultural Heritage Imaging RTI reflectance ball on the end of a threaded rod, Amy Astley (PhD student studying the taphonomy of historic shipwreck sites with the University of Southampton’s Department of Ocean and Earth Science ) and myself exited the stern of the Shogun  (http://www.msdsmarine.co.uk/) into the 16c water of the Solent and made our way to a part of the wreck that has a large section of exposed planking.    It did not take long to locate a trenail and setup up for its URTI dataset capture.   In c. 8 meters of water with a southeasterly rising tide bringing dirty water in from the Solent at a rate of half a knot (approximately 1 foot per second), I struggled to stay in position while making this data capture.  A half knot current is enough to gently blow an inexperienced diver off the site.  I was entirely surrounded by smooth planking and even though I wore extra lead weight to help keep me down for the task, it was all I could do to hold onto an archaeological marker tag with one finger and freehand the light  positions with the other hand.  Periodically, I had to pause while debris passed by or momentarily got stuck on the trenail.  In the end, and much to our amazement the camera did not move and the capture was a success.

These JPEG images are screen captures from the first ever PTM file generated from an underwater archaeological field environment.  This trenail has been submerged for 255 years.  It is c. 3 cm diameter. You can easily discern the longitudinal grain patterns of the wedge, the radial grain pattern in the trenail, and the clear signs of site degradation from marine wood boring micro-organisms on a surface that Dan Pascoe testifies was ‘prestine, just one season ago.’  A big thank you to Amy, the crew of the Shogun, Dan Pascoe, Dr. Sturt and my classmates for a fantastic and memorable day of diving.  One more small step forward for URTI.

R. Dan Pascoe. C. Dr. Fraser Sturt. L. David Selmo on board the Shogun anchored near the HMS Invincible.

Raw image in the PTM file dataset. The reflectance ball is on a threaded rod held down with a soft-pack diver lead weight. HID hand-held light is oriented from the upper left corner of the photo.

Screen JPEG capture of the finished PTM file with slight specular enhancement transformation applied.

HMS Invincible

Show embedded map in full-screen mode

Location of HMS Invincible

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Dave Selmo notes camera settings and lighting configuration.

Raw image capture from ‘set 4 of 7′ used in the processed PTM file.

Camera mount improvised from dive shed rubbish and a 30″ Stilson pipe wrench.

JPG capture of the PTM file, diffused gain transformation applied.

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