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Underwater

The Warship Vasa – Part 2

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. Continue reading →

Mud, glorious mud (and maybe some sand)

Understandably, there is often a focus on maritime archaeological sites that lie underwater and many of the most impressive or important ones, like the Mary Rose, or the Vasa are discussed during the shipwrecks course. We are also familiar with sites on land that have their origins in maritime worlds, ship burials like Sutton Hoo, or silted up harbour sites such as Myos Hormos in Egypt. Continue reading →

Life of a core sample

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. Continue reading →

A place for submerged aircraft in maritime archaeology?

In this post, maritime archaeologist Tony Burgess examines the growing sub-field of aviation archaeology. 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. Continue reading →

Underwater RTI HMS Invincible

On February 19th,  1758 the HMS Invincible set sail out of Portsmouth Harbor for Canada to join the British fleet to fight the French.  Unfortunately, due to a domino effect of extraordinary bad luck, she ran aground on Horse Tail Sand not far from the harbor.  Invincible was a French ship launched in 1744 and captured by the British in 1747.  At that time the British out-number the French on the sea. Continue reading →

Underwater Reflectance Transformation Imaging…a success.

I’ve been working on Reflectance Transformation Image capture in a sub-aquatic environment.  On 2 May, 2013 the first ever PTM file from an RTI dataset captured entirely underwater was successfully processed in the Archaeological Computing Research Group computer lab at the University of Southampton using RTIBuilder software.   Images were captured in 1.5 meters of water at the campus Jubilee pool using a common 12mpix digital camera and a 15 watt 1000 lumen HID dive-light. Continue reading →