Maritime Archaeology – Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds: Maritime Archaeology Thu, 25 Apr 2019 15:48:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.14 70120278 Professor Jon Adams Teatime Lecture http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2016/09/28/professor-jon-adams-teatime-lecture/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2016/09/28/professor-jon-adams-teatime-lecture/#comments Wed, 28 Sep 2016 14:00:01 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=1532 In October 2014, Professor Jon Adams delivered a short lecture to students aged 16-19 at University of Southampton. If you would like an introduction to maritime archaeology then this video is for you… Professor Jon Adams’ topic About 71% of the earth’s surface is covered with water and yet how much to we know about what’s hidden in the depths? …

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Professor Jon AdamsIn October 2014, Professor Jon Adams delivered a short lecture to students aged 16-19 at University of Southampton. If you would like an introduction to maritime archaeology then this video is for you…

Professor Jon Adams’ topic

About 71% of the earth’s surface is covered with water and yet how much to we know about what’s hidden in the depths? Drawing on the expertise of the staff and students of the Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton, we’ll be discussing topics such as:

  • the impact of changing sea-levels on the geography of our planet and the legacy they have left behind.
  • the development of seafaring technologies.
  • the emergence of globalised economies.

We’ll also take a look at the science and technology behind data collection, from diver based research to cutting edge remote sensing techniques.

Transcript

I spent a lot of my life on various excavations around the world including some of the shipwreck excavations you might have heard of including Mary Rose and as you will have discovered this morning shipwrecks are part of what maritime archaeology encompasses, but they’re also (you probably learnt from the guys this morning who you met) that it involves a lot of other stuff too.

Right. Let’s just refresh our memories. Did they give you any definitions about what maritime archaeology is this morning? Okay. I’ll offer you one. “The study of the remains of part human activities on the seas, interconnected waterways and adjacent locales.” If you ask somebody in the street what they thought maritime archaeology entailed and what it was all about and what maritime archaeologists did, what do you think would be the first things that people might suggest? [Off screen – Shipwrecks]. Shipwrecks. OK, that’s predictable. Almost the first thing that people would say. What else? What might be associated with shipwrecks? Go on, say the dirty word – treasure! Which? [Off-screen – pirates!] Pirates, yes, that’s another one. Pirates, shipwrecks, treasure. I’ll show you an image that encapsulates just these things in a bit, but in fact as I’ve already intimated maritime archaeology encompasses a lot more than ships. Although, as you will discover this afternoon, I am a little bit fond of shipwrecks myself and that’s where I actually spend a lot of my time researching. I hurl myself in the water at any opportunity but, if I throw up this diagram I’ll try and indicate what I mean about Maritime Archaeology, which is more than just what is in the water, more than just one type of structural site, which is the shipwreck.

We’ve all heard of shipwreck sites, iconic sites like Vasa and Mary Rose, but there’s an awful lot to it. Ships are built on shore, built by people who spend most of their lives on shore. Ships are responses to political, economic and military strategies that encompass land and sea, so everything is interconnected. Just look at this map of Europe this sort of diagrammatic map of Europe and what it’s showing is rivers. It doesn’t even show, by a long stretch, all the navigable waterways and bits of streams and rivers that have been navigated by people in boats over the last several thousand years. But you can see how the continental mass is incised and riddled with water. And if we actually look at human activity, if we zone human activity, maritime archaeology is not just interested in what happens on the water, or even on the waterfront, it’s interested in what happens in the whole of the coastal zone and in the rivers and lakes hence the definition of ‘interconnecting waterways and adjacent locales’. We’re not even just interested in the rivers and lakes. We’re interested in everything that’s in between.

So, in Homer’s Odyssey there’s a nice little bit where Odysseus, on his way home to his island home of Ithaca, has a dream. He meets the ghost of the seer Tiresias. Tiresias warns him that he will kill all the people who are suitors for his wife and to make atonement for that murder he has got to put an oar over his shoulder and walk inland, far away from the sea, until nobody knows what he’s carrying over his shoulder. Now, if we think about people who wouldn’t know what an oar or a paddle is in this country, you can’t get far away enough from the sea for that. So, essentially we’d say (the maritime archaeology crew at Southampton would say) that actually the whole of the archaeology for the British Isles, for instance, is heavily maritime in many aspects. I’m slightly biased.

So, let’s go back to our shipwrecks and treasure and pirates… Is this maritime archaeology? Well, yes and no. In fact, there are quite a few things right with this picture, and in fact in some ways it is actually not indicating the full potential, the full grandeur, of what we can find underwater. Perhaps we could argue with the artist’s juxtaposition of plants, which wouldn’t grow in tropical seas and the amount of shipwreck structure in this picture, which shows above the sea bed, but that’s only because those things are in the wrong place. In other ways, it is actually quite true to what we can find in certain places in certain parts of the world and from certain periods. But let’s just revert to “it’s not all about what’s in the water and it’s not all about shipwrecks”.

Going back to that diagram where we saw the coastal zone, the hinterland, the landscape, cut and incised with rivers and lakes etc all part of the same communication and transport system. Can you see through the trees here? What can you see? What do you think it is? There’s a great big pile of rocks. Do you know what that big pile of rocks might be, carefully placed there? [Off-screen – It’s a grave]. It’s a grave from the Bronze Age probably set up about three thousand years ago and now it’s in this very atmospheric place in Sweden. You walk up to it through the trees and in fact it’s one of several monuments on this island… There! I’ve given the game away… it’s on an island. And, in fact, because of sea-level change, because the land has risen after the last Ice Age, the sea relative to this point on this island is now twenty metres lower than it would have been the Bronze Age. So, we’re looking at a very different environment now.

It’s a very atmospheric and almost a romantic place, but it’s on an island and so we have to think about people in the Bronze Age going out and burying their dead on an island many kilometres from the mainland, which is where their farmsteads would have been. But of course they were exploiting the water. They were moving around in boats and we can see this from the pictures of those boats that they’ve left behind in profusion in southern Scandinavia. We cannot number the number of carvings on the rocks of Norway, Sweden and Denmark and Finland. There are literally hundreds of thousands of them and they’re being discovered at quite a fast rate even today. But of all the things those rock carvings depict: people, huntsmen, fish, whales, animals, wild bear, sun discs etc. All of those motifs are quite common, but the one that is most common of all – maybe 40% of all the rock carvings in Scandinavia – are the boats. So this tells us something about the importance of boats to the people who lived in that place and at that time. And if we think that they were using these boats to go back out to these islands and bury their dead in special places, we can see how maritime archaeology is not just interested in the boats that people sailed in – they are fascinating in their own right – but we’re interested in the whole of the social approach to life-and-death: agriculture, seafaring, communication and the expression of identity in the prehistory, where we have no documents to help us.

And in fact those islands where the burials are now covered in trees, this is perhaps what they would have looked more like three thousand years ago, with a much higher sea level, no tree cover. And we can imagine those great big cairns of stones would have been visible for miles. And another aspect of monumentality out at sea in the prehistoric periods all over the world, in fact, is that when people set up monuments on the coasts of course people can see them for a long way. So they become markers of all sorts of different cultural aspects other than just saying this is where a very important person was buried. They perhaps form quite useful navigation aids, for instance.

But, what about the stuff in the water? I’m going to turn back to the water because we do find lots of stuff in the water, which helps us to answer archaeological questions perhaps more efficiently and more thoroughly than much of the data we find on land sites – and we’ll see why that is in a minute. Now archaeology was a little bit slow on the uptake. When I was a student – which is a very long time ago, I have to admit – when I was a student, archaeology conventionally didn’t really approve of the idea of doing archaeology underwater. It was a bit sort of lunatic fringe. You know, why would you go into a place like this to try and find archaeological remains. Even if it was there, wouldn’t it be destroyed? Wouldn’t it be spread all over the place in a meaningless random scatter of stuff? Okay it might be interesting to pick up a piece of bronze statue from the Mediterranean and put it in a museum, but surely it had an art history value? What about archaeology?

Well, the destructive power of the sea in many ways is elusory, when it comes to the preservation of cultural remains, as we shall see. Of course, even if we do get in the water sometimes it’s not particularly comfortable. Diving in these waters is a little bit chilly, for instance, and sometimes even if you go underwater, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. So, again why would you bother, ran the conventional view of archaeology in the 1970s and 1980s. You know, why bother doing archaeology underwater when we’ve got so much stuff on land. Now in fact all of those three pictures I’ve just shown are archaeological sites. This is a wave that’s just rolled over the wreck of the Dutch East Indiaman sunk in 1749 off the south coast of Sussex. The ice picture is from the Baltic, where I spend a lot of my time and we dive in the winter because that’s the time we get the clearest water, the best pictures and the best video. And this was not such a good day on the Mary Rose site. But we work around these conditions. It’s not like this all the time. Hastings Beach is not being thrashed by rolling waves 2 metres high all the time; the Mary Rose site had visibility of several metres for most of the summer and Sweden, well if you want to dive in icy waters just use a dry suit or, even better, a hot water suit. So, we’ve learnt our way around all these environmental problems and we’ve learned to develop methodologies and techniques that allow us to exploit the archaeological remains of these environments very, very efficiently. And we can exploit the advantages of investigating sites under water.

Now we could at our simplest work rather like a land archaeologist simply being underwater and using a hand or trowel as you might have seen on various excavations, or perhaps some of you have even participated in excavations. But sometimes the environment, the sediment we’re working through, means that we have to use slightly more involved methods to do what archaeologists do on land. Now, if we think about… Has anybody done any archaeological excavation? Has nobody? Nobody? Right. OK. You’ll see… Time Team? Have you seen Time Team? A few of you have seen Time Team… Okay. So Phil Harding’s there in his hat in the trench, and he’s saying, “Ooarr, Tony…” and all that sort of stuff and he’s trowelling away and he’s trowelling away. What he’s doing he’s actually doing is dismantling the sedimentary deposits in which various artefacts and archival materials have become assimilated over time. And what happens then is when Phil’s scraped away a certain amount of soil, he’ll transfer that soil into a bucket, into a wheelbarrow, and take it away to a spoil heap and there it may be sieved, just to make sure that he hasn’t missed anything. But there’s two things going on. There’s the actual excavation where you’re dismantling that physical catalogue of the past and then there’s the removal of spoil. Underwater, we can do the whole thing seamlessly.

So here is the business of the excavator on the Mary Rose site, actually in this case excavating with a paintbrush, because what is actually being excavated here is a sea chest – about this long, this high, made of wood this thick – and although it looks perfectly preserved (and indeed you can see this very chest if you go to the Mary Rose museum) if you had slipped and put your thing through it, or put the trowel through it, the wood would have had the consistency that wasn’t much more robust than wet blotting paper. So the preservation is there, but in terms of stability it’s a little bit elusory. So we have to work out ways of excavating this with sufficient control so that we don’t break anything, miss anything and we can recover it to the surface and conserve it and record it and display it. So we can actually see what’s going on here diagrammatically, if we put a drawing around the photograph, you can see the excavator is in fact a diver with no fins. Fins are inconvenient in this situation, so we don’t wear fins. We have the feet on a grid, which gives us stability and we and the tools that we’re using are neutrally buoyant, so that means we’re not floundering around in the trench and putting our knees and elbows into that sensitive archaeological material that might be damaged if we did. And what the diver is holding in his left hand is an airlift – essentially an underwater vacuum cleaner and it works by piping air down from the surface from a compressor into the bottom of the tube and as the air goes up the tube it expands and accelerates and it creates a suction at the bottom end and that draws up all the spoil that on land you’d have to put into a bucket, and into the wheelbarrow, and off to the spoil heap in the rain and everything like that. It’s much easier underwater. And this is the technique; these are the devices that were used to excavate the Mary Rose over an 11-year period between 1971 and 1982 when the ship was recovered.

In slightly warmer and clearer waters, this is excavating the wreck of the Sea Venture, which was lost off the reefs of Bermuda in 1609 and this was a ship that left Plymouth in June 1609 bound for Jamestown, the first English settlement in North America. But it got separated from the rest of the fleet in a hurricane and for four days battled to stay afloat by chucking stuff overboard and they reorganised the whole of the ship’s company to three shifts, bailed and pumped for their lives for nearly four days, and when all was lost, they’d given up hope, the Admiral Sir George Somers spied land, in the nick of time. So the captain tried to bring the ship as close to shore as possible, but they couldn’t get over the reefs, so the ship grounded three quarters of a mile out. But it jammed so solidly in the reef and the weather by now, mercifully, was abating and so all 150 people on Sea Venture managed to get off onto the island and they found that its name at the time, the Isle of Devils, was rather a misnomer because they found that Bermuda was actually rather a nice place and indeed the permanent habitation of Bermuda starts from the time the wreck of the Sea Venture occurs on the reefs of Bermuda.

And in 1610 most of the people from Bermuda built two smaller vessels and continued to make their way to Jamestown and the were greeted as though they had returned from the dead – in fact they have – and the personal accounts of two of the people on board Sea Venture that were in that horrific storm – it in fact it was hurricane – make their way back to England, where those letters, those discourses on the adventure are passed around the backers of the company, the financiers of the company. Merchant adventurers in the Virginia Company of London. One of those men is Henry Risley, who was the Earl of Southampton and he was also the patron of one playwright, William Shakespeare, and the very next year Shakespeare writes the play The Tempest. The Tempest Wreck.

So we now have excavation, technology and methodology to excavate anything we find with sufficient control so that effectively there is no barrier to us excavating anything we find. So we could sensitively excavate skeletal material such as this archer from the Mary Rose and indeed these objects from the Mary Rose, many of them underwater, incredibly fragile but well preserved in the sense that they still maintain their form and they carry all the information. So we have a nit comb with organic material still in the teeth of the combs, that thing is a pocket sundial, rosary, a whistle, a thimble, jewellery, gold coins, the leather cover of a book, clothes, lots of organic materials, foodstuffs. So we have in a shipwreck like this, the whole environmental package of life at sea in the Tudor period. Many of these materials don’t survive on land sites and it’s the waterlogged deposits, it’s the water and more particularly the sediments that covers things underwater and cuts out the light and the oxygen, which is the most fantastic preservative. This is why sites like the Mary Rose are like they are. That’s why we are drawn to them as archaeologists because they’re treasure troves, to use a dirty word again, but they’re treasure troves of information. They’re sources of information that we can’t really get anywhere else, and so that’s the lure of maritime archaeology.

Of course once we’ve dug it we have to… excavation is partly a destructive process, and so we can only justifiably do that if we do two things: first of all, we’ve got to record what we find in various ways; secondly, we’ve got to publish it which would include museum displays as well. Otherwise, we’ve done an even better job of destruction than most treasure hunters. So that’s the difference. So, sometimes we use the humble tape measure underwater, it’s still reliable, still quite quick and easy, and we process those measurements with various software programs, which allow us to do clever things with three-dimensional survey.

Sometimes we can use sound as a tape measure instead, and in fact acoustics is a whole-industry in underwater technology, much of which is central to the way we do archaeology now, from whole process of finding sites to the way we record them, right the way through to publication and museum display. And the way it works is that we know the speed at which sound travels through the water. Say we say it’s 500 metres a second, and so if I initiate a pulse of sound and I record the time that I have released that sound, and the time it takes to get to a receiver, I can actually convert that time to a distance. And so that that simple relationship is the basis of a lot of acoustic systems that we use. One of the simplest ones, for instance, is literally an acoustic gun, which we used to measure distances, which would be slightly more than is convenient to swim backwards and forwards with the tape measure. So when we might use a tape measure very efficiently and achieve surprisingly accurate results – two or three millimetres or so within the confines of the bit of shipwreck structure, or within a trench – if you’re wanting to measure twenty or thirty or forty metres, something like this is much more much quicker and much more convenient. So, the surveyor fires the gun, the pulse goes out and is received by a transponder, so it is receiving sound and it then goes, ‘Ah – that’s me’ and it fires a pulse sound back and we can convert that to a distance. And, in fact, we can even take that distance several times and do a best fit, a sort of an average or a mean, of all those individual measurements to narrow the accuracy.

We use photography and video a lot underwater – increasingly now that digital technology has made taking photographs underwater so much easier, but how do we find stuff in the first place? And I’ve shown that that is another picture from Bermuda, and it is very nice to work underwater in Bermuda, but sometimes the water is more like that. And so how do we find stuff in water like this? How do we find stuff when it’s several miles offshore? How do we find stuff in water that is moving a little bit too fast, current wise for safe diving? Et cetera et cetera. Well, I’ve mentioned acoustics and this is where acoustics come into their own, in terms of prospection – going out and seeing whether we can find either a specific site that we might want to find, or whether we’re simply doing area survey so that we can actually assess the archaeological potential or the resource in a particular area of sea, lake or river bed.

And one of the systems we use now is essentially what we call multi-beam bathymetry. So a multi-beam essentially is a sonar, or it’s rather 500 sonars, all mounted on the bottom of the ship, all firing an individual pencil beam of sound, so imagine the ship going along the seabed with this fan-shaped array of signals propagating from the single-source several times a second down to the seabed. What happens to that sound when it reaches the seabed, it hits the seabed and bounces back, and so the transceiver on the boat receives the echo and again does this time-distance calculation and effectively if you know where the ship is in three-dimensional space, you know exactly where that sound source is, when it’s firing all those pings of sound. Not only where it is in XYZ, but in fact its attitude, its tilt, its pitch and its yawl – if you can control for all those criteria, all those parameters, you could then organise all those reflections from the seabed into what is effectively a topographic map of the seabed. And it all happens so fast that the ship can be steaming along at up to 10 knots and in real time mapping the seabed. So we can do many, many square kilometres of seabed a day – tens of kilometres a day.

Now, if you want to narrow in on specific sites that we find, we can then move in and use an array of other systems to actually look at them in high resolution or in slightly different ways again using sound. This one works in a similar way to the multi-beam, but instead of lots of pencil beams, it has two fan-shaped arrays that hit the seabed, and this time they also reflect and give a reflection of the seabed, but in a sense they’re telling us about the nature of the seabed, so whereas multi-beam gives us the geometry or the topography of the seabed, side-scan (which is what this is called because the beams are propagated either side of the tow-fish) that match the sea floor in terms of quality, so it’s rather like a map. So on an aerial photograph we could see fields, we could see trees, we could see quarries, we could see sea shore etc, side scan gives us the marine equivalent to that, so that it shows us the mud flats, the sands, the gravels, the rock outcrops etc. So, geologists use this a lot. But it’s brilliant!

In fact, both multi-beam and side scan are brilliant for finding anything that sticks up through the muds of the seabed, because anything that sticks up – especially if it’s hard like wood, or rock or metal – will reflect the sound even more strongly than surrounding sediments and it’ll stick out like a sore thumb. So it’s a fantastic prospection tool. We can use these pieces of equipment from small boats or ships like this.

In fact, there was one other I want to mention to you. This one here is another really important system, because whereas the first two that I mentioned – the multi-beam for mapping the topography and side scan for the quality of the seabed – the sub bottom profiler sends lower frequency sound actually into the seabed, so whereas with the higher-frequency stuff like side scan the sound hits the seabed most of it’s reflected back up straight away. The sub bottom profiler puts the sound into the seabed, so if you’ve ever been to live music and you’ve stood by the base speakers, you can feel the speaker, you can feel the floor move, and that’s because it’s low frequency sound. The high-frequency stuff is the stuff that hurts your ears. Now the sub bottom profiler is really useful to us, because while we are interested in mapping the topography and the nature, the character of the sea’s surface we also as archaeologists interested in what’s underneath, perhaps completely invisible, not visible on the surface at all, and what the low frequency sound does is it travels into the seabed and every time it meets a change in material so gravel, sand, silt, clay, wood from something cultural, every time the sound passes from one material to another part of the sound is reflected from that interface. So essentially, it’s refraction, and so we end up with a slice through the seabed, a vertical profile (hence the term sub bottom profiler) of what is going on below the seabed. And we can mount all these things on fairly small boats or even submersibles or indeed ships like this to cover more areas out at sea.

A lot of the stuff that I do is in this place: the Baltic. The Baltic is a fantastic place because of its particular qualities with respect to those shipwrecks that I’m interested in.

Those of you who have seen Mary Rose will know (or even seen pictures of it in a book know) that in fact the Mary Rose survives as one half of the ship. It’s almost, when you look at it now, it’s almost like one of those Victorian dolls’ houses, where you open out the front wall and you see the floors of the house in cross-section. Well, Mary Rose looks like that. And that’s because when she sunk, she sunk deeply into the seabed sediments of the Solent and the stuff that was in the seabed is what you see today.

Everything above the seabed in the water column was eroded away by various agencies – many of those agencies biological. And on the right of the screen, you see a piece of wood that has been eaten by the critters that did for the upper half of the Mary Rose. In fact, there are two agencies, which are the two organisms, which cause us most trouble. One is a little crustacean, called limnoria and the other is actually a mollusc – it’s known as a ship worm, but it’s really a mollusc and that’s Teredo, Teredo navalis and Teredo is what has made these honeycomb tunnels through this piece of wood and essentially infestation from these organisms means that any wood exposed in the sea is essentially gone in a relatively short space of time.

But in the Baltic, see that it’s only connected to the oceans of the world through the North Sea through relatively small channels here. And the budget of rainwater from its catchment around the Baltic means that, in fact, it’s more freshwater than seawater. So, in fact, there is water flowing out of the Baltic – that means its salinity is much, much lower than any other sea in the world and that means that these critters don’t live. Teredo and limnoria can’t survive in the Baltic, and that means that when a ship sinks in the Baltic it’s going to be there for a very long time.

The first time we had a dramatic example of the sort of preservation that the Baltic could offer was the salvage of the warship Vasa in 1961. This is the ship just showing above the water when they have lifted it from the bottom by 12 strong wires, and this is that ship having been underwater 333 years being floated back into a dock on its own keel. They raised it from the seabed after more than three centuries, pumped it out and floated it back into the dock. We couldn’t do that with Mary Rose – she wasn’t quite so complete.

And that’s what Vasa looks like now in a museum in Stockholm. It’s rather like walking into an enormous cathedral – it’s a huge museum. And to a certain extent this ship is a monument to a time when Sweden was a very different country to the one we know today. At this time (in the early 17th century) Sweden was one the bullyboys of Europe. It had the most professional mercenary army and they were right at the centre of European power politics. But Vasa, although it was thought to be a unique case and just, you know, just a quirk preservation we knew from what other wrecks were like in the Baltic that there might well be others almost as well preserved.

And as we have now only in the last few years started to move into the deeper waters with the systems that I showed you (the multi-beam, the side scan and sub bottom profilers), we’ve now started to find wrecks that are completely changing the nature of our maritime assemblage in the Baltic, if you like. Here is a side scan sonar trace discovered by this ship, this one here. It was searching, in fact, for a lost seaplane and in the process it discovered all sorts of things including this.

This is a shipwreck. It doesn’t look much like much now, because what’s happening, what you’re seeing here, is the sound that has travelled from the shape, which is probably about here it’s hit the wreck and bounced back, so the bright areas are the timbers of the ship’s structure itself, the ship’s hull. But if I show you what the shadow is, because this thing is standing up about the seabed and the sound’s coming here, so the sound can’t get behind the wreck, so it leaves an acoustic shadow on the seabed. This is what the shadow looks like. There you have… When we put the remote operated vehicle, the submersible, down to have a look at what we’d got, we saw this. And just to put that in context, you’re looking at that piece at the stern of the ship, in fact, you can’t see it clearly on the screen, but even the carvings are still on the ship. So this is a merchant equivalent to the warship Vasa. And it’s in 128 metres of water, and that gives you a clue as to why it’s so well preserved, because there’s very little oxygen down there. So not only do we not have Teredo, we don’t have limnoria, we don’t have much oxygen. So although all this material, the wreck of the ship is degrading slowly, it’s very, very slow. Two of the masts of the ship are still standing. Going in a little bit on the stern, you can just see the rudder [pointing] (rudder here) and all the furniture is still in the captain’s cabin. Further along, you can see the main hatch, the anchor still catted over the side of the deck, the windlass (that sort of rotary winch affair to draw the anchor up), all still there. Almost looks as though the crew have only just left it the day before. So this is the sort of staggering preservation that is coming up in Baltic.

The very next year – only a couple of years ago – the wreck of a warship that people have been searching for for years, decades, was found and this is the wreck of the warship Mars that sunk in 1564, so this is a Swedish equivalent to the Mary Rose, although Mars was twice the size of Mary Rose. It was the biggest and most powerful ship of its day and it sunk a German ship of a combined German-Danish fleet in a great battle in 1564 and it was so powerful that no single ship could have tackled it, so the Danes and the Germans rather cleverly said okay we can’t defeat it ship-to-ship so we’ll just close in on it with lots of ships, and we’ll just board and fight it out hand-to-hand, and that’s what happened. And with hundreds of soldiers fighting it out hand-to-hand, something caught the magazine alight, the ship blew up, and went down in a matter of minutes taking 800 people with it.

And this is the degraded bit of the ship. Here’s one of the bronze guns lying on the seabed, and here’s a couple more sticking out from the underside of the ship, but the stern of the ship is still largely intact. Here’s the rudder. Here is the upper side of the hull, with the diver just looking through the gun port, and this is at 70m in the Baltic Sea, so I don’t know whether any of you dive, but most scuba diving is done with compressed air, down to about 30 metres. This is more than twice as deep as that, so you have to use special kit with different gases to get over the physiological problems that would occur if you tried to breathe compressed air at this depth.

But archaeology is still possible and that’s what’s the surviving part of the hull structure at Mars looks like as a photo mosaic. So this is actually a digital mosaic of hundreds of individual underwater photographs taken in artificial light, so you wouldn’t see any of this down there, if you were down there without light. It would be literally pitch black, but shine powerful lights and all of a sudden you can see for metres and metres. And so individual, about one metre square at a time, is photographed with a 50% overlap and it’s all put into a into a program like Photoshop (it’s not, it’s called AGISOFT), so it’s actually photogrammetric software, which essentially does the maths to work out how to stitch adjacent photographs together and if you have 50% overlap or more what the software does is identifies the common points in the two adjacent photographs and essentially combines them. Bit by bit you work out until you’ve got your whole site photographed.

However, it looks great, but in fact there are probably, well we know there are, inaccuracies with it, so, as well as the photography, we use acoustics again to try and provide a more reliable and accurate three-dimensional model onto which we will then drape the photographs. And this is another type of sonar. It’s a sector scanning sonar. And what’s going on in the black sort of curved bit there is the scanner is going to go up and down like that when the instrument is activated, deployed overboard, send down to the site, and then put up next to the wreck. And here’s a single scan. That’s the ship over there, this is the seabed, this isn’t a hole in the seabed, this is simply where the scanner is standing, so it can’t survey what’s underneath it, but it can actually survey the sort of hemisphere above it, if you like, including a wreck.

Here’s another one and what you’re looking at is the stern of the warship Mars. You’ve got the rudder, or the sternpost here, a loading port just to the right of it, and then up above that, gun ports. And you’ll probably be able to see it a little bit more clearly if I put alongside it a photograph of the same part of the ship taken from roughly the same view. And then, of course, what we can do is we can then start to put the acoustic digital model together with the photograph and we can stitch the acoustic scans together. And we’ll end up taking literally hundreds of these scans that take about, maybe, 10-15 minutes each having to move the tripod each time. So, it’s a bit of a long job, but the technology is moving this way – it’s getting faster and faster all the time.

Just to finish off with the one of the most recent wrecks discovered in the Baltic. If I had seen this photograph about ten years ago, I would have suspected it was fake. It looks rather like a Steven Spielberg film set, but it’s not. It’s real. The guns are still sticking out of the gun ports in this wreck. This is the wreck of the Swedish warship Sword that sunk in 1676 – another battle against the Danes – they were always hammer and tongs against each other. Good for archaeology, because we have a lot of wrecks on the seabed as a result of their struggles.

So those are all in the diving range, but now what about the places we can’t go physically as divers? Those same technologies that we use to discover wrecks on the seabed or assess areas of archaeological potential, acoustics and various other technologies, magnetometry, et cetera, we can use those in very much deeper water, simply by sending them down on submersibles or vehicles such as remote operated vehicles. So, a remote operated vehicle is essentially a submersible, which is tethered to the surface by an umbilical, usually a fibre optic cable, through which we send data and retrieve data to control the vehicle, to drive it around and to receive the photographic or digital imagery coming from the seabed.

And this is a project we were involved in the Mediterranean a few years ago with Bob Ballard, the guy who discovered the Titanic amongst other things. And this is, although it’s orange, it’s actually an American Navy ship, but that’s not the real, sort of, vessel of importance here. This is simply a support vessel for this. If you want to do archaeology in the Mediterranean, and you want to find things, use a nuclear submarine. This thing is the perfect search vehicle. It’s festooned with all the lights and sonar you could ever require or at least it was. Alas, the Americans scrapped it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist anymore. But, for a few years, it was a great archaeological tool and essentially it has the capability of submerging down to the seabed, staying down there for many days and essentially going up and down surveying the seafloor and recording what it finds. And then it could come back to its point of origin, and after 24 hours it will only be a few metres away from that original point of origin – that’s how accurate its Doppler guided navigation system is. And so we used NR1 (as it was called) to find archaeology on the seabed and then we use one of these remote operated vehicles to send down and actually look at the sites so found. This is the sort of archaeology you do with a cup of coffee in one hand and a joystick in the other, so it’s quite lazy from that point of view. But this is the sort of thing we’re finding.

On the deep seabed of the Mediterranean, half a mile down, we find shipwrecks that have not been interfered with by people, so they haven’t been salvaged. So we have a class of shipwreck, which provides data in perhaps slightly purer forms than wrecks in shallow waters where they’ve been dived on, or salvaged, or trawled or cut with anchors and stuff like that.

We also carried out some experiments in terms of how we could use robotic technology to excavate with and we also used – not in such deep waters, but in slightly shallower waters – another sort of underwater vehicle. This is the autonomous underwater vehicle. So instead of an ROV, which is tethered to the support vessel, an autonomous underwater vehicle is something that is programmed, so it’s loaded up with the instrumentation you want to use, it’s programmed to navigate a certain route underwater for a certain time. It does that and it then comes to the surface where you can go and pick it up, download the data and send it off for another 24 hours, or another week, or whatever.

We make them here in the Oceanography Centre. We have a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles, known as auto sub, and these things are the longer duration ones are from about here to the wall and then there’s a shorter type, which is designed to go more slowly through the water. But, again, they can carry any array of instrumentation, depending on what sort of underwater science we want to do. This is a slightly different form of AUV. This is designed to go very slowly, so whereas auto sub might go, sort of, this speed through the water this thing will literally go about 1-2 centimetres a second. So, like two microknots. And the reason we want to use something like this on an archaeological site is that it’s carrying cameras as well as sonar and it will pass over the site very, very slowly, and take lots of overlapping photographs, the same photographs, that same pattern of photographs that we need to provide those photo mosaics. Something like this.

So, here’s a wreck in 80 metres of water off the island of Chios, in the Aegean. It contains largely two forms of amphora. And it’s one of the earliest examples of a ship carrying almost an industrial scale cargo. This is oil and wine being exported from where it’s been grown and processed on the island, exported all over the Mediterranean world. And we can create a mosaic like that from individual photographs now in a matter of minutes. We could drape that photograph over the digital terrain model derived from the sonar systems. So, this is that same combination that we’re using the Baltic on the shipwreck surveys.

So, if we’re thinking of the old question of whether archaeology is an art or a science, perhaps it’s a bit of both. These days we can’t do archaeology without science, and yet we’re interested in the final analysis – in people. We’re investigating these sites with all these whizzo pieces of kit, because we want to understand the sites and while we might be interested in the material remains of the past: the ships, the amphora, the coastal communities, the relationships between harbours, the hinterland, shipyards, all sorts of stuff. So, the material culture, the material remains of the past is our starting point. But, the reason we’re looking at stuff, at things, is because, as Mortimer Wheeler said a long time ago, archaeology is actually about people, not things. The things are the way of getting at what the people were doing. So, let’s have a look…

I’m going to finish off with one example a little bit closer to home. And here’s another ship, which is useful to get at the politics of the past, in this case the medieval period. If you go along the M27 between Southampton and Portsmouth you’ll pass over the Hamble River and if you look up to your left, as the river sweeps away around a bend, there lies the wreck of Henry V’s great ship the Grace Dieu. He had it built in order to carry troops to France, but in fact by the time Grace Dieu was ready for the sea, he’d been over and he’d won the battle of Agincourt, so it was really not needed. But, it was the greatest ship ever built in medieval England. Indeed, it was so big that there was not another ship constructed in England that exceeded the Grace Dieu in size for another two hundred years, that’s how big it was. With the help of Time Team, if we actually imagine what it would look like next to our diving vessel here, it was that size! So, perhaps not the size of a super carrier of today, but this was the super carrier of the medieval period. And to build a ship that size out of wood and iron nails, which is essentially what we’re talking about, they had to adopt extraordinary sort of methods to join the timbers in a sufficiently strong way to make a viable seaworthy hull. They actually made the hull out of overlapping thicknesses of planking, up to six layers thick. And we can’t yet work out how the sequence of timbers go together, so one of the reasons we’re going to go back to the site next summer (which is the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt) is because we want to try and find out a little bit more about the wreck of the Grace Dieu and how the shipwrights at the medieval period did what they did.

Now you’ve just seen the bare mud. You say where’s the ship? Well, it burned to the water line in 1439 and although that means all the upper stuff is gone, the ship was so big that is below the water and indeed now lying in the mud is still an enormous piece of ship structure. It would still be as long as the remains of the Mary Rose in Portsmouth.

So, what are we doing? Well, we’re going to go back to that old favourite, the sub bottom profiler, myself and my colleagues from the Oceanography Centre have used a variety of systems on this wreck and essentially what you’re looking up in the top right hand corner is one single pass with one of these sub bottom profilers – so, what you’re looking at is a slice through the riverbed, looking down from the surface. The top of the orange and yellow bit, that’s the river bed and then looking down into the river bed all those bright orange and yellow bits, those are the things buried in the river sediments, which are reflecting the sound. So, as you can see they’re literally bright reflectors acoustically and you can see the stuff off to the side but nothing underneath it – that means that the sound is not being able to get through whatever it is it in the mud. In fact, we can tell that the interface between what is in the mud, in the mud below it is sort-of boat shaped, and if we then take not one slice across the site, but loads and loads of slices, just like the slices of a loaf bread, we can actually reconstitute the shape of the buried hull of the Grace Dieu.

Now that’s the old-fashioned way of doing it. The guys down at NOC weren’t satisfied with this slightly tedious way of producing a three-dimensional model of what is buried. What we get is essentially a map of density of the amplitudes of the reflection. So, this is the strongest reflection and it gets weaker and weaker, and this is describing roughly the shape of Henry V’s Grace Dieu lying in the mud. This is OK, but they came up with an even better instrument. Still a sub bottom profiler, but instead of sending down sound into the seabed and getting a slice, they send down sound into the seabed and capture the reflections in a mat of hydrophones. So essentially what we’re doing is we’re insonifying a great block of the sub mud settlements of the River Hamble, so we’re now able to characterise the buried anomaly as a three-dimensional object rather than making it up out of slices and this is the result. And that is the acoustic reflection of the buried hull of Henry V’s Grace Dieu, and if we just put it next to a sub bottom profile trace from 1967 we can see how far things have come in a relatively short space of time. This on the left is the sub bottom profiler trace that shows the Mary Rose lying in the bed of the Solent. This is how the Mary Rose was discovered with a sub bottom profiler.

So I’ll leave it there. We’ve nearly done the hour, and perhaps I’ll have time for a bit of… a few questions, because there’s a lot of maritime archaeology that I don’t do as much as the ship wrecks, so, waterfront archaeology submerged prehistory, such as… you met Fraser Sturt this morning. He does all that sort of stuff, so there’s a lot more to it. I’ve only really just given you a sort of bird’s eye view, well a ‘my eye’ view of it, if you like. I would be pleased if you, before your next session – I think you got until half past before your next assessment – fire a few questions at me, if you want.

Professor Jon Adam teatime lecture transcript

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Summary of our second maritime archaeology Tweetchat http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2016/02/11/summary-of-our-second-tweetchat/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2016/02/11/summary-of-our-second-tweetchat/#respond Thu, 11 Feb 2016 22:25:25 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=1140 Here is a summary of the discussions that took place in our Tweetchat this evening: Don’t forget to join us next week using #FLShipwrecks

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Here is a summary of the discussions that took place in our Tweetchat this evening:

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

Birds on a wire - a real-life Tweetchat!
cc- By- 2.0 wildxplorer
https://www.flickr.com/photos/krayker/4962969492/sizes/z/

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Engaging people with maritime archaeology across the globe http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2016/01/29/engaging-people-with-maritime-archaeology-across-the-globe/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2016/01/29/engaging-people-with-maritime-archaeology-across-the-globe/#respond Fri, 29 Jan 2016 02:39:02 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=972   We are now just about ready to press go on the next run of the shipwrecks course.  This will be the third time we have run the programme, and it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on what we’ve learnt, what we hope to achieve in this next run and … to get feedback on what people think …

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We are now just about ready to press go on the next run of the shipwrecks course.  This will be the third time we have run the programme, and it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on what we’ve learnt, what we hope to achieve in this next run and … to get feedback on what people think might be good to do next.

First, some numbers. With the next run of the course we will have reached over 19,000 people worldwide through the Shipwrecks course, a number that goes up each day with additional sign-ups still occurring.  This is a monumental achievement if we consider what might have been thought of as the slightly niche nature of maritime archaeology.

One of the joys of running the Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds course has been engaging with those 19,000 people, and realising not only the breadth of interest out there, but also the depth of knowledge.  The comments sections for each of the steps that people complete have become a wealth of information, broadening out on what we could provide through the short videos and articles.

We have also learnt what people would like more of.  People have really engaged with the steps on the course that include activities, from looking at changing sea-levels around the world, through to identifying wrecks in bathymetric data.  This something that we think we could perhaps do more of, providing an entry point for people to access and understand freely available data – making heritage resources more accessible.  This is particularly important for us when thinking about submerged sites.  These are locations that the vast majority of the population will never visit (either because diving isn’t an option for them, or because access is restricted).  We can now help people to engage with these sites remotely.  As such, if there is an interest, this is something we could develop further.

19,000 people is not a huge number when compared to those who sign up to free language courses, or even the number of people who might visit a local museum.  However, it is a substantial number of people in terms of broadening access to maritime archaeology.  In the past our means of engagement have been more limited in terms of numbers of people who can attend (conferences) or require a financial investment perhaps only suitable for those with a distinct focus on the subject.  Being free, and globally available, the course has enabled us to see the demand that lies out there and help people gain access to resources for them to build their knowledge of our shared maritime heritage.

Behind the scenes putting on the course takes quite a bit of effort from a whole team of people.  As such, we’re interested to know what you think of our efforts, and, how you think we might continue to develop and open up resources for maritime archaeology.   If you are doing the course for the first time we would love to have your comments, and, if you’re returning to dig a little deeper, please do let us know about what the course has done for you (and what you think it could do in the future).

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From Myth to Reality: The submerged heritage of Mahabalipuram, India http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2015/06/24/from-myth-to-reality-the-submerged-heritage-of-mahabalipuram-india/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2015/06/24/from-myth-to-reality-the-submerged-heritage-of-mahabalipuram-india/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2015 14:00:12 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=728 Mahabalipuram, a UNESCO World Heritage site located on the Tamil Nadu coast of India, is world-renowned for its cave temples, Pallava era art and architecture (8th century AD) & shore temple. Local myth was that the shore temple was once part of a much larger temple structure which featured seven pagodas. Anecdotal evidence supported this: early mariners referred to the site …

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Shore temple at Mahabalipuram
Shore temple at Mahabalipuram

Mahabalipuram, a UNESCO World Heritage site located on the Tamil Nadu coast of India, is world-renowned for its cave temples, Pallava era art and architecture (8th century AD) & shore temple. Local myth was that the shore temple was once part of a much larger temple structure which featured seven pagodas. Anecdotal evidence supported this: early mariners referred to the site as “Seven Pagodas” and 18th and 19th century European visitors recorded elderly locals as saying in years prior they had been able to see the glinting copper tops of the pagodas out at sea.

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Lion statue that appeared on the beach of Mahabalipuram after the 2004 tsunami

Myth abruptly turned to reality in the wake of the devastating December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean.  As the water pulled out over 500m immediately before the tsunami, locals and visitors reported seeing long rows of straight stones before they were swiftly recovered. However, the tsunami had removed centuries of silt from the sites and uncovered several small statues and temples on the shoreline.

Diver working on the site
Diver working on the site

As a result of the eye witness reports, the Archaeological Survey of India and the Indian Navy conducted a survey of the site.  This revealed a large series of buildings, walls and platforms that have been interpreted as forming a large complex.  Based on the style of carving, coins found at the site and the historical evidence, archaeologists believe that the site does date to the Pallava era.  Although Mahabalipuram was a port city during this time, the specific layout and proximity to the remaining shore temple suggests that this may be the location of the lost six pagodas.

After the tsunami, elements of the site are now visible at low tide
After the tsunami, elements of the site are now visible at low tide

There are two theories as to what destroyed the site.  Some archaeologists believe that the majority of the temple complex was likely destroyed in a previous tsunami in the 13th century.  Others point to the severe coastal fluctuation in the area over the last 5000 years and suggest that the site eroded away.

Work continues on the site, with the hope of identifying more structures and their purpose as well as better understanding the history of the city as a whole.  The myth of the Seven Pagodas may be coming to life before our very eyes.

Further reading:

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Ships and Shorelines – Maritime Archaeology Conference http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2015/02/06/ships-shorelines-maritime-archaeology-conference/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2015/02/06/ships-shorelines-maritime-archaeology-conference/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2015 10:34:53 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=526 Ships and Shorelines: Maritime Archaeology for the 21st Century 16-18 October 2015 Avenue Campus, University of Southampton The Royal Anthropological Institute’s annual conference is open to everyone with an interest in archaeology – and this year the theme is ‘Ships and Shorelines: Maritime Archaeology for the 21st Century’. Our own Prof Jon Adams will be delivering the keynote address on …

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Ships and Shorelines: Maritime Archaeology for the 21st Century

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16-18 October 2015

Avenue Campus, University of Southampton

The Royal Anthropological Institute’s annual conference is open to everyone with an interest in archaeology – and this year the theme is ‘Ships and Shorelines: Maritime Archaeology for the 21st Century’.

Our own Prof Jon Adams will be delivering the keynote address on Friday and the following two days will see presentations from experts discussing topics as diverse as submerged prehistoric archaeology, World War I maritime losses and the Mary Rose.

There are full details of the packed line-up of speakers (including several of the Shipwrecks Team) on the Royal Archaeological Institute’s website here, along with details of how you can book and attend the conference.

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Discussion about ethics in relation to Maritime Archaeology http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/11/07/discussion-ethics-relation-maritime-archaeology/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/11/07/discussion-ethics-relation-maritime-archaeology/#comments Fri, 07 Nov 2014 13:07:15 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=499 On Thursday 30th October 2014, the Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds team took part in a Google Hangout on ethics and Maritime Archaeology. This video recording of the hangout features subtitles, and a downloadable transcript is available: Google Hangout on ethics transcript Transcript of discussion on ethics and maritime archaeology Fraser: OK, hello, potentially lots or few people – we really …

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On Thursday 30th October 2014, the Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds team took part in a Google Hangout on ethics and Maritime Archaeology.

This video recording of the hangout features subtitles, and a downloadable transcript is available: Google Hangout on ethics transcript

Transcript of discussion on ethics and maritime archaeology

Fraser: OK, hello, potentially lots or few people – we really don’t know who is out there. So, this is the Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds MOOC discussion about ethics and Maritime Archaeology. We’re going to begin by a slight apology in that we do have other people on the other side of the world who are trying to join in but our technical capabilities are slightly letting us down, so Paul Johnston and Alexis Catsambis over in the US are waiting poised to be integrated, but we may have to take their comments via email and Twitter. We’ll try and get them integrated, so do please feel to ask questions either via the YouTube channel or via Twitter and we’ll answer them. We also have a stock of questions that have come in via the FutureLearn platform. So, we’re just going to begin by introducing ourselves and then we’ll think about beginning the discussion around the questions, which were posted on FutureLearn.

So, my name’s Fraser, it’s very nice to meet everyone online.

Peter: Peter Campbell.

Geoff: Geoff Downer.

Ian: Ian Barefoot.

Crystal: Crystal Safadi.

Julian: Julian Whitewright.

Helen: Helen Farr.

Dani: Danielle Newman.

Esther: Esther Unterweger.

All: (laughter).

Fraser: OK, so the first question that we posed on the FutureLearn platform I’m just going to read off Peter’s laptop to my right, so I’m not ignoring you all:

On the assumption that the best archaeological practice is pursued and any artefacts that are recovered are kept as one collection is it legitimate for shipwreck excavations to be privately funded and privately housed?

Really this touches on a couple of really related issues to do with the practice of archaeology and some core principles that underlie what many of us would see as archaeological practice. Now just as a caveat at the beginning there is an important distinction to be made here between legal and ethical and legal obviously relates to the varying codes of law around the world in different countries and what is legal in some situations can be very different now. Law prescribes one set of practice, but different groups of people subscribe to different ethical codes as well and many of us here will be speaking from an archaeological point of view, which has a particular stance with regard to material culture and shared heritage and this influences our views and we’re very happy to debate that, so when we talk about right and wrong this is often from an ethical standpoint which we would take and are happy to explain that may not coincide directly with a legal standpoint. If there are any questions about that, do feel free to ask. So, what do people think about funding excavations (because it is a challenge) and private collections?

Peter: Well, I’ll hop in there and certainly it’s one of the big questions – how do we fund archaeological projects? There have been ‘for profit’ models, but by and large they have not gone very well. None of the ‘for profit’ projects have done particularly well in terms of what we think about when we talk about archaeological ethics.

Geoff: I think it’s a very interesting question in itself, but the question specifically about should a project be privately funded and privately housed. I think it depends on what privately housed means. Actually, I don’t have a problem with it being privately housed and paid for by a small admission fee if the public has access to it. But being privately housed – locked away somewhere for someone’s private gratification – doesn’t seem right to me.

Fraser: I think that’s often the key thing a number of us would pick up on. It’s about access and keeping a coherent collection of material which is fundamental here, so private funding is welcomed in many respects in terms of helping if it’s about releasing and promoting sort of scientific investigation but the removal of materials into private collections when the term ‘private’ is about off-limits that’s I think, where many people become concerned because that’s acquisition rather than curatorship in some respects.

Helen: I think as well that seeing as we’re talking about private acquisition we’re creating a monetary value to the objects as well so that begins to get us into the problem that you’re creating a market for these things and I mean, obviously one of the UNESCO rules was that Cultural Heritage shouldn’t be commercially exploited, so we’ve got to bear that in mind as well.

Dani: It’s a bit about the legacy of the collections as well and sort of how long a private ownership can exist and how long an individual or group can sort of say it will they will be able to pick stewardship of an object and just because one group says we’ll be able to build the house, be able to provide access for academics and for the public to see it doesn’t mean that that is always going to be the case I think one of the other big issues is if it’s being, if a project’s being, privately funded with the intention of recovering artefacts for private use, at what point does the recovery of the artefact outweigh the value of the archaeology itself? Because, at the end of the day, the artefact is a lump of metal or a piece of wood, it’s the context in which it’s found, within the site that’s important, that’s what tells us about the people who were there who created whose sad loss possibly created the site so where do they disappear into the financial loss, if you like. Or the financial background? That to me is the worry.

Peter: Yes and certainly, so I’m from the American South where in the 1950s and ’60s there was a rash of excavating privately excavating Civil War vessels and creating private museums to house them. The cost of underwater artefacts – preserving them and storing them and putting them on display – is enormous and what ended up happening in many of the cases there is that the public had to take over the financial burden, and the care of it and open public museums to house them and it ended up costing a fortune for the public.

Julian: What did the public think about that?

Peter: They were not happy!

All: (Laughter)

Peter: In fact, on a number of occasions they tried to burn the shipwrecks to destroy them so that they wouldn’t have to pay the financial cost. Some were buried and now there’s an overpass over one in South Carolina, so I mean in some cases we’ve lost these ships forever just because there was no long-term plan for the conservation and stewardship.

Ian: I always told divers, [I talk to divers and I am one], the way I always phrase it to them is, ‘Look that piece of metal sitting on the seabed might be wet, cold and slimy, but it’s happy down there. You bring it out and, with the best will in the world, take it to a museum curator you can watch the museum curator’s face turn into a cheesy grin as he says or she says, ‘Thank you very much’, but in the thought bubble over his/her head there is ‘How much is this going to cost the museum?’ Leave it where it is, tell somebody about it, but leave it where it is.

Geoff: Unless where it is of course it means it ends up being dredged up and thrown away by fishermen.

Ian: There is that to it.

Peter: It is a delicate balance.

Julian: I think there is also something within there about who the ownership of the shipwreck is within in the first place in terms of the private or the public funding and the accessibility of it if it’s deemed to be a site that is of you know, public value and it’s being preserved for the good of the public they might not think it’s for their good, but you know it’s there for them all of the ones we have around the UK and people are working on those then there’s a duty that that should always be publically accessible I think, anyway.

A moral duty?

Julian: I think both. And there’s a huge amount of work in that’s gone on in Britain that is all in private collections, but those private collections are publically accessible either sometimes for a fee paying museum sometimes by arrangement but there’s a lot of different scales within and equally there’s a lot of work which has been carried out by public bodies that have been publically which is publically inaccessible

Fraser: I think that’s a very good point and that brings us on to we’ve actually got a question which has come in online which says: “Although I don’t agreed with illicit trading and treasure hunting the searches that have been carried out by treasure hunters the searches that have been carried out by treasure hunters in a way provide substantial research and discovery otherwise not possible by scientists.” I think this is an interesting question because it is one that gets asked a lot and I think there’s variability because there is a baseline. The more surveys that are done the ocean’s a big place, the more sites are found. There’s a difficulty here in that actually we’re seeing increasingly large amounts of off-shore surveys done for a number of purposes – off-shore construction and so on – which are often integrated with archaeology and in a very close way, so I think the argument that treasure hunting brings a huge resource to maritime archaeology that isn’t there otherwise I’m not convinced at how legitimate that is in terms of the total area surveyed.

Julian: How many submerged landscapes have treasure hunters discovered?

All: laughter

Fraser: I think that’s a very… I’m obviously very biased and for me there is no treasure in terms of the broad… for much of the periods that I’m interested in the science approach to it But even with the wrecks, I honestly don’t know the search areas considered, data released and contribution to wider scientific knowledge, if that’s the argument to be made, through that treasure hunting and so I think it’s an easy argument to make but one that’s very hard to back up with actual quantifiable data about improvement of the knowledge base in terms of total area.

Dani: I think for me part of the problem is that there’s just, there’s a lack of communication, and so there’s a lack of knowledge about how much, how much treasure hunters could know and how much people have discovered that they’re not they’re not sharing so it’s a case of while we do know some things have definitely been found how much has been found and not reported. That’s the difficulty.

Peter: Unfortunately, we just don’t have really good figures on any of this just as far as there actually are not that many treasure hunters out there. There’s very few firms, both public and privately owned, whereas you have state and regional archaeology, whereas you have state and regional archaeology, you have commercial archaeology… if you were to look at a regular average run-of-the mill commercial archaeology unit they’re running out and they’re recording and surveying you know, vast amounts of shipwrecks per year. You look at most treasure hunting companies and they’re looking for one wreck specifically, maybe finding you know one or two a year. They’re doing a very small amount of surveying and recording compared to, you know, your average commercial archaeology unit. Compared to, you know, your average commercial archaeology unit.

Dani: But what are they finding that they’re just not interested in and not saying?

Peter: For a specific wreck, they may find other stuff as well.

Helen: I think, also, which skews the public opinion of what is going on in part is because the treasure hunters are looking for the ‘glory wrecks’, so the famous wrecks with perhaps the bullion and things like that the really famous ones so of course, when they do find them, it hits the press and it becomes spread around media and so more people see it – it’s more visible. Whereas quite often commercial archaeological units are doing really good work – they’re recording important historic shipwrecks perhaps scientifically important but they’re not necessarily going after those really ‘glory’ finds, so it doesn’t necessarily become international news.

Peter: Right. The ship graveyards surveys that record 60 or 10 wrecks don’t get reported in the media whereas, you know, the search impossible discovery of one treasure ship, you know, goes across the…

Julian: It also goes back to that question, think of some of the work that has been done in the Mediterranean where huge amounts of the Mediterranean seafloor and the Black Sea have been systematically recorded with the same state of the art kit that a treasure hunting company might be using stuff like RPM’s work at the ???orcady island???

Peter: Yes, yes, 250 square kilometres of – all deep-water shipwrecks

Julian: 1600 years old, the masts still standing. Phoenician wrecks off the Levantine coast, there have been plenty of unsuccessful works that have been done as well, so it is happening and it is happening in a scientific context by people who are really well-funded.

Helen: I think the difference is there’s been a huge development in technology which is now accessible by archaeologists through collaboration within the industry and before up ’til maybe a decade ago it actually was the treasure hunters who were privately funded who had this deep-water investigative equipment. They had access to AUVs and ROVs and were able to get down there, whereas now today if we want to get down there we can also get down there, so the gap has really closed.

Peter: And not just through industry, private organisations and universities: University of Malta, Woods Hole with Ballard’s work, RPM, These are purely archaeological groups surveying massive tracts of seafloor systematically.

Helen: Yes.

Geoff: In the case of places like Woods Hole, industrially funded in fact…

Peter: Well yes, some of it is.

Julian: If you go back to the work at ??? What was that? 1982? That is deep-water wreck ages before anyone was doing it in that sense with the ROVs. It just wasn’t pile of bullion on board it was a pile of dress and 2-4 amphora

Fraser: OK, so we’ve had another interesting question – you’re firing questions in at appropriate times as we’re having discussions, so this is good – saying:

‘Land-based archaeologists have had to deal with metal detectorists for a long time, is there anything they managed to do to find compromise that might work in the maritime discipline?’

And again that’s interesting, perhaps contextually relevant to Britain, in particular, where we have something that is called the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Here this has generated a huge amount of data from metal detectorists working in ploughed fields which has sort of revolutionised our understanding of distribution of particular kinds of artefacts – obviously, metal artefacts – and extended our knowledge of them, in part through sheer weight of number of people being out and it has established a framework where that knowledge and that material can be taken to a local expert and it has established a framework where that knowledge and that material can be taken to a local expert. They will appraise it and say what it is, when it dates from, enter it onto our Historic Environment Record and fill in a report so it gets properly accessioned.

In some ways offshore we have the Receiver of Wreck in this country who officially takes that on. Items that are recovered, they have to be declared back to the Receiver of Wreck. It’s not geared up in the same heritage manner and is an unfortunate – in terms of heritage perspective – view about the monetary value of items. It’s more difficult off-shore in that there is and divingwise there is a link in terms of people can report material that they find from wreck sites and so on, but it doesn’t feed through in the same way and principally, I think, it’s because of the nature of the things you find. When you’re metal detectoring across the surface, it’s a bit like having submerged shipwrecks and your equivalents which would be just lured by material on the surface and you’re picking off a little bit and going, “Oooh, I found something!” There might be something more significant. Whereas when we’re working with other forms of offshore salvage perhaps might come up against these things. It’s a different order of magnitude in terms of investment and recovery. So, I think, on the one hand the Portable Antiquities Scheme has been great. I really think it’s added a huge amount to our understanding and it would be really good if we could find a similar way to engage people, but perhaps with the look, record things with a photograph and show local specialists what you found and have that data entered that way. Because then there’s still the engagement, improvement of the record, and for many metal detectorists its about the enjoyment of discovery and we can participate in that and also think about how we can use it to add data without leading to degradation of the site.

I think one of the problems is that I’ve worked in commercial archaeology companies with metal detectorists on discrete sites and they’re actually very useful.

Ashamed to admit it, but they do tend to find the tiny coins that the diggers have missed when they’re in the spoil heap. The big problem is the underwater world, if you like, is it’s very much a hidden world to everybody except a diver and to a certain extent it is discounted by the ‘powers that be’. What goes on under there isn’t visible to the general public, therefore, don’t worry about it. But of course, we’re losing resource. It is quite possible for a diver seeing an artefact to take a rough notes of its location and report it to English Heritage and it goes on the but that knowledge resource is actually quite difficult to access because a lot of the terms there are done in ‘archaeology speak’.

Fraser: I think that’s a really good point. It’s been one of the really nice things for us doing the MOOC has been the level of interest It’s been really good to engage with this many people about a topic which you’d think only interests a small proportion of people but it’s been thousands of people interested in shipwrecks and archaeology and I think there is something that we have got to do about democratisation of knowledge, and engagement with people. So yes, you can use our favourite terms of ‘citizen scientist’ and waving hands and things like that, but I do think Ian’s got a really genuine point. I think it’s a more difficult thing when we talk about protection of heritage that is less visible. It is easy with a barrow or an upstanding monument on land, to help people make awareness of it, but it is remote from the vast majority of people and we’re asking for a considerable investment in some ways and leap of faith.

That said, I’ll say, hand on heart, there has been a sea change – excuse the pun – in both. There are now a lot more white metal detectorists than and similarly with divers when I started diving in the very early ’70s, I didn’t bother with a weight belt because I had a sledge hammer, cutters, everything else… and I was down there with the rest of them. Now the ethics have changed in dive groups. I have no doubt about that. Now I know one person who will still take bits everyone else is there on the ‘look, don’t touch’ basis, and I think that’s brilliant. What we need now is ‘don’t touch, but please do tell”.

Peter: Do you think that’s somewhat related to the Nautical Archaeological Society and the training that people get there and its influence?

Ian: Geoff and I would certainly like to hope so. I think that it’s partly the training relatively few people in numbers terms and it’s quite a small operation overall in the UK and worldwide, possibly even smaller, but I think, what is very important and the big benefit of that has been the way that the diving industry in general and the magazines and so on have been Nautical Archaeology Society so much the people who are actually training members as we are of it the wider diving world see it through the articles and things it’s more of interest to them. Diving organisations as well – BSAC, PADI – they’re all much more ethically focused now. I mean they’ve always been ethically minded, but I think there’s a difference between minded and focused. And it’s the ethos that’s changed generally and I think that’s come from multiple directions. I think one of the things probably is television with the archaeology series that have been on there. It focuses people’s attention on Widely considered that Time Team has had the biggest influence in the UK for all its faults, as we see it,

When I came to this university to start my BA I was a member of a class of 45. I was one of the seven mature students and most of the rest were there because of Time Team.

Fraser: I think we, sorry were you going to say something, Helen?

Helen: I was just going to say that it’s definitely this question of education, which is going to make the difference, and it’s not just through archaeological bodies, but the dive bodies themselves are… PADI for example… are doing their wreck courses now and it just helps people be more aware of what they’re looking at and how to deal with materials with its bounds and it been recorded before but not just the diving community. What came to mind were the trawlers in the North Sea and there was a really successful programme which gave these little classes to the fisherman to tell them what to look out for in terms of actual Pleistocene forms of material from the submerged Doggerland and Doggerbank which was just being trawled up every time they went out they were bringing tonnes and tonnes of remains up out of the North Sea. It was just being dumped, because no-one knew what it was or how important it was but with forms that went around and lectures that went around suddenly the fishermen were coming in and they were filling out all these sheets and things and could actually pinpoint exactly where material was coming up so divers and maritime archaeologists can go back and they can survey and hopefully, possibly, pinpoint whether there are sites and things like that, so at least it is all being recorded and it isn’t just being brought up and then thrown away so that’s another example.

Ian: I think that’s common, I mean, even in historical archaeology I think, if I remember rightly, the ??? site was actually found because an antiquarian went down there and asked in the 1800s and said “Are you finding any unusual stones?” And people said, “Oh yeah – we find these.”

Fraser: It’s an amazing resource. Dr Rachel Viner, as she now is, recently completed a PhD here looking at this and there was a phenomenal record in the museums of things which people handed in because they didn’t have this interest. They recognised the value from the early 19th century onwards and there was a period of sort of disinterest where it went away and then the re-education that Helen was talking about is really driving it again, so you could have read that data as that it all got dredged up and the sea was bare and it stopped in about 1960 but actually it was just sort of a shift in interest and then as soon as you start asking people again then it’s back again… and there is a richness to the material so I think it goes on. One is as an amazing resource sat in museums but secondly, there is a real power to, well to, enabling people to recognise what they’re pulling up.

We have another question: which sort of ties in again. Which is some of these reasons from Hurley Books saying:

‘I know divers that jealously hoard the locations of wrecks because they don’t want others to come and share it’

but actually an example from Colossus – another wreck – is a good example of sharing and learning and I think this is one of the things that we push is that it really is that change in how you value something which is really important shifting it from a monetary value or an exclusive value into wrecks that you don’t know, to one where it’s through the process of investigation that you gain additional knowledge and that that is where the significance of these materials lie and their potential does. I think again this is where the diving agencies have actually really pushed this because there is a whole diving with a purpose has become one of these key elements and if you think about the potential, the number of divers out there and the work we could do, it is just phenomenal.

Julian: that comes back a bit to the question about the methods etc. think we’ve had a… maybe because it was the advent of SCUBA and all of the sites that that has uncovered but that was akin to people going out and…

Fraser: Well, that’s my favourite, I may have said this before now, but that’s my favourite story for the empowerment of people is that we’re saying that, you know, everyone focuses on shipwrecks and I’m always dragging it towards the submerged worlds angle, but if you look at the discovery of a lot of the Danish submerged worlds they came from this public call for people to find an early site.

Exactly, in the 1950s, and we would do this differently now. We wouldn’t ask people to just pull it out we’d ask them to leave it in situ but we’d the knowledge base that helps to generate has left a legacy that people are still working on today, so that is one moment of getting everyone engaged and you can really see why globally this has a real potential in terms of a shared resource because there are lots of people who now dive and there are now lots of wrecks in different places that are accessible.

Dani: I think in the UK it’s also it’s really important to acknowledge the benefits to the licensee programme and how that really allows avocational maritime archaeologists to do some incredibly professional work. And to really have access to sites and it’s wonderful that the local divers are able to work on sites that they love and to contribute to archaeological knowledge of them and they get support from English Heritage to be able to build their skills and to just help their knowledge

Fraser: For those of you who may be in different parts of the world that don’t know we have a system where our protected wrecks are given a licensee who is responsible for monitoring them and this can actually anyone can apply to be the licensee and forward that application and that enables them then to carry out the they can apply to do survey work on it and non-intrusive works and in very rare cases if intrusive work is justified and it has been a long-standing idea of engaging people I think there’s ways in which we could push it even further really and think about as Julian said, drawing the thread from discovery to the excitement of being engaged all the way through to dissemination because that’s the other issue…

Julian: That’s where the system stops.

Fraser: It is. It’s where we all struggle. Everyone struggles. The joy of doing it, but also the importance of saying that it’s not enough just to find the things or to recover them, the really important thing is that documentation and release of opening up of the data as well There is an accumulative study in archaeology.

Peter: And there are divers who keep sites under wraps, I wouldn’t necessarily say ‘hoard’ but they keep things hidden from the general public and from other divers in order to protect sites and certainly in the caving community it’s very important that people don’t want to see caves destroyed or disturbed or looted, and so they keep sites to themselves and so there are groups that agree to map caves and to tell them what they’ve been finding and that sort of thing whilst keeping the locations confidential For the sake of natural and cultural preservation.

Dani: It’s also a safety thing, isn’t it?

Peter: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. A fatality greatly affects the entire cave-diving community.

Julian: That happens in land sites as well. There have been a number of hoards in this country that have been unearthed, excavated, all the work’s been done on them and then it’s been six months before they’ve been publically made visible just to stop people or discourage people from digging up the field for whatever else there might be there. Within the PIS the finds location officer is quite entitled to mask locations of the site.

Fraser: And we see this across the world different countries have different approaches to this in terms of whether it’s possible to release locations of wreck sites for very good reasons and this is, there is no, hard and fast rule, I think, and this comes back to this issue about ethics and management and how you can control it and different countries have different approaches. Some take an open responsibility approach and this is what we see as an appropriate response and others take a more protectionist stance and say once located we’ll either obscure the location or physically mark them so that you’re not allowed within these zones and this is why it is complicated, because there is no single answer to how you should ethically approach things. We have our ideas and our arguments to support them or ideas of value as well and this is why I think it’s important that the discussion is had and very openly about this because it will differ but we have to be able to put forward strong arguments which people can then decide what they think about.

Oooh – we have another question.

‘So is there an organisation that can make decisions if a site isn’t a site of archaeological interest? In the Mediterranean we constantly find artefacts and often we don’t know if the artefacts are important. We should have a website to upload images to evaluate.’

Absolutely, yeah, or a national heritage. So that is a really good idea and a really good question. What do people think or know?

Peter: Certainly in most countries there is a central repository or even in regions. So in the US you have state archaeologists that are the central repository and people can go look at their records or request records and they keep track of everything that is found. In Greece for underwater there is the underwater antiquities and in Albania there is the coastal authorities. So most countries have a central repository where divers can report finds and where they keep a database.

Fraser: I think, it is the same too, isn’t it? Yes. And I think it, I think you raise a, I think it’s a really good idea and it’s a model that some of us would probably go for where an open accessibility to upload and share and very rapidly because then you could also have photographs of materials in situ which is what a lot of us would like. So you could take a photograph and say this is what I saw and this is where again you hit that buffer between a desire for openness, which I think a lot of us would hope for, and the competing concepts of value, which come with it. So how do you cope if you’ve found an amazing cargo of Majolica or something like that which has a value in a different economic sense as well? So, I think it’s a really good question and Peter: And the fact that you haven’t heard of these websites or organisations wherever you are based kind of speaks to how archaeology and governmental agencies need to communicate better that these facilities exist!

Julian: What you do when you find something. You shouldn’t have to resort to Google!

Ian: It’s also a very interesting question and very timely because it’s the example of where technology is helping the amateur diver because with the advent of the compact camera that a lot of us have got now it is really very easy and really many more divers can take very good digital photographs of things they find. It actually speaks to the previous discussion we were having because I’m not saying it’s right or wrong butt it’s entirely possible to take the photographs, upload them to a site without revealing where the site is they took the photographs

Fraser: Yeah, absolutely.

Ian: Yes, if they wish to do so. Quick plea though – please put something in it to act as a scale!

Fraser: No, I think that’s a… Yeah, I think there’s an awful lot in that as a potential, I mean there’s also a huge amount that could be done through time with a crowdsourcing of underwater imagery as mapping. Now that we’ve got increased computational power to do these things, so actually, there are lots of different routes where I can see us engaging the diving community more broadly in heritage research and so I think it’s a really good idea but it’s one that would also… it has to overcome those issues of local practice and policy really and it does vary and there are different cultural sensitivities to things, so yeah, a very good idea, I’d say. Do follow up.

Peter: We have a great question from Laura via FutureLearn, who asks,

‘What do you think about reburying archaeological wreckage when a country’s institutions cannot guarantee proper preservation?”

So in Buenos Aires there is an ancient Spanish trade ship that was found when there used to be a river, but it silted over and it was excavated and they hadn’t, they didn’t have the funding to preserve it properly and put it in a museum, so it was then reburied in a different place. So what do you all think about that approach?

I think, personally, I think it’s perfectly sound approach, provided it is buried in an agreed place, which won’t subsequently be built over.

Ian: And also, it comes down to an ethical issue. Who decides that that particular country at that time is not capable of looking after its heritage? We’ve had examples in the recent past – Iraq and Afghanistan – where we know archaeological sites have been threatened or destroyed [?] is probably the best option that many countries have Nothing can be done about it, but at the end of the day, who is standing outside saying, ‘That needs to be buried.’ and also has the legislative clout to do it.

Dani: I think certainly lots of countries internally decide that they just can’t deal with the shipwreck because as Peter said, the cost of conserving it, and the cost of making it accessible to the public really is too much for lots of countries to be able to deal with. In those cases – certainly detailed recording of the shipwreck – [re-?]burial is probably the best option that many countries have

Geoff: It’s certainly better than destruction, isn’t it?

Dani: Absolutely. And it’s certainly better than taking it and watching it rot away.

Ian: And English Heritage will tell you it’s the preferred option here.

Julian: I think there’s a slight difference, isn’t there between just preservation straight in situ, and other recovery, recording and then re-burial for the purposes of conservation.

Fraser: Absolutely, I think that’s quite different.

Julian: That’s the important difference to make.

Ian: One answer with smaller artefacts for countries where they’re under threat is send them out as a road show, as a permanent travelling exhibition. That a) keeps them safe, and b) can attract finances in for on-going conservation.

Fraser: I think it’s something that could almost be seen as heretical, that you can say as well in this situation, is that not every shipwreck needs to be preserved for posterity once excavated, recorded and documented so the concept of preservation by record in archaeology is quite an established one that’s what we do with terrestrial sites – once they’re excavated, they are gone – and I’m not saying that in every situation this is acceptable, but there is actually a value to these materials as a learning aid that we can sometimes take on that we don’t have to preserve for perpetuity every frame and ships timber so we don’t have to always be able to conserve forever there may actually be a justifiable reason for excavation, recording, in detail once that process has finished, removal and making it accessible as something that people can interact with or learn from as well. So, I think the two things – I think it’s a very complicated chain. I think preservation it situ demands – [phone rings] Oh! I think we might actually have succeeded in something there. Or is that you?

Peter: I think it’s a separate call.

Fraser: We’re obviously very au fait with the technology here, you can see. So yes, we should apologise that we’ve failed to integrate our other hangouts or hang-ees, whatever the term is! That doesn’t sound entirely right, does it? But we will include them in the conversation in terms of answer to questions and so on. Paul and Alexis, we really are thankful that you provided the time for this and we’re really sorry that we haven’t been able to find the button to press to include you, and sorry to everyone else who’s watching this because it would have been very good to have their presence.

Peter: They are commenting – so Dr Alexis Catsambis is a maritime archaeologist with the US naval command and in this whole discussion he pointed out the USS Westfield, which was excavated everything was recovered, it was fully documented and studied and subsequently all diagnostic artefacts were conserved and [] non-diagnostic artefacts were re-buried in a similar waterlogged environment. So that cut down the cost of conservation and also people can go back and find it later if they need to look at any of the non-diagnostic artefacts

Ian: Well, to a certain extent we’ve done that here of course with the Gresham ship.

Fraser: Yeah, absolutely.

Ian: She moved from a car park where she dried out in 6 months to the Navy’s – or the joint services – diving school where she floated until we dropped an anchor on it but she’s now actually in the diving centre at Stoney Cove in Leicester and anybody who wants to see a Tudor period merchantman is more than willing to go and look at her.

Fraser: And I think that’s it, it’s that sliding scale of things that we encounter archaeologically and some of the different things they can contribute once excavated, so I think it’s true so I don’t think equally archaeology should be painted in the light of people that always want everything kept in aspect and preserved because actually we’re on the reverse, we’re actually very keen in the recovery of information from these things so investigation, destructive investigation even, is a really important part of what we do but it’s always with a justification and a plan as to what happens next. So the example Alexis gives of removing and then thinking about how you conserve a whole which is complicated but by placing it back in a comparable environment is a really good one because that’s about removing objects which can be conserved and studied relatively easily it does leave it open to an element of further interpretation at a later date I mean, it’s happened with land sites, like Butser. They were dug in the ’20s and ’30s, reburied, and now they’ve been re-excavated and new information, because of new technologies, comes around So it’s a great idea, it can just sometimes be frustrating.

Helen: And this ties quite nicely, actually, to a question we had by Twitter earlier today about whether people have sunk material to study degradation and actually the answer to that is yes by reburying, what it does give us, is the opportunity to study degradation of material and the site formation processes which help us think along the line, understanding conservation and also understanding how we can recognise sites because of, for example, things like scour pits, and things like that, in the future so it is really important and it’s part of continuing the knowledge that we get about these underwater sites.

Julian: We have a question via YouTube.

Fraser: Oh, we do, yes.

Peter: Just one more thing. Alexis and Paul are very eager to contribute. So sorry that we can’t pull them up, but just a bit more on the Westfield project. Alexis says that it was a mitigation project, which means they were widening the Texas ship channel, so it had to be removed or else destroyed and he says that by non-diagnostic, they mean there are hundreds of small metal fragments that have no features or anything else, no inscriptions and so all those extra bits were then buried in a similar environment to preserve them.

Ian: I take it she was a Civil War ship?

Peter: Yes, American Civil War.

Julian: This is one for you all to get your teeth into, from Robert Smith:

‘The panel complains about artefacts in private collections not being seen by the public but what about the masses of artefacts in museums that are documented but never on display. How about selling them off to raise money for new exploration and research?’

Fraser: It’s a really good question, and it’s tied into a very complicated – well, not a complicated issue – a relatively straightforward one for museums, is that very few museums can actually do that even if they had made a decision that they would do that, they take on a responsibility to care for those objects Now, it is interesting that there is a tiny percentage of material that’s in museums that is on show and I think it’s a very fair thing to say that it would be good to be able to do more of it.

Julian: You can see if it you ask.

Fraser: Bang on the door and ask. Exactly.

Geoff: If you know it’s there in the first place.

Julian: Now you get all the catalogues online, so all the stuff that’s – say, Greenwich, for example, all of their catalogues of ship plans are online And they’re available, most of them are digitised you can actually whistle them up electronically, so it’s hard to know that it’s there, but it is more available than it was ten years ago.

Peter: I was just going to say that museums weren’t designed to be a public – a weekend trip they’re designed to be repositories, so what they show is actually a very small percentage 10% or less – in some cases 1% – they’re archives, so as public institutions you can go and request to see any of the artefacts just because it’s not on display, doesn’t mean that you can’t ask to see them. So they’re designed in order to – on the one hand, draw in the public, but the vast majority of their budget and people working there and everything else is for – as a repository, as an archive.

Fraser: Yes, I think that’s something that doesn’t get pushed enough because they are fundamental in terms of archaeology as a practice in archaeology, we need these archives for comparative purposes and they’re a really substantial investment, but a fundamental tool for what we do, and it’s taken a long time for us to build those up, and it’s hard to over-estimate the value of it.

Dani: I think it’s also important to remember that museums change their displays and that just because something isn’t on show once doesn’t mean it will never not be on show and that’s one of the brilliant things about going to museums There are some museums I’ve been to probably dozens of times a) because so they’re so vast, and b) because there’s always a new show on, there’s always new objects on display and that’s one of the things that makes them so interesting and so wonderful for viewers.

Fraser: So just very quickly, on a slight side tangent, but to go back to the re-burial question Hurley Books asks,

‘Do you add something to the re-burial site to let future archaeologists know that this an anomaly?’

It’s a very good question, and I think it would vary in different parts of the world nearly anywhere I’ve heard of it would have to be, because you’re introducing a potential shipping element that would normally be recorded as an activity and either a hazard or a feature on the seabed floor but you are right, you could possibly imagine situations where it would be a confusion, given enough time

Ian: Nowadays of course, in the UK, the marine management organisation would have it on record.

Fraser: Absolutely, but you can imagine the time depth we have – give ourselves a thousand years and changing recording systems – the difference between ourselves and the Romans etc. etc. – and you could see, it might be a puzzle to someone but hopefully archaeologists of the future would be interested in, why did they do this, and how effective was it? So, not a stupid question, a good question.

Peter: The general practice is to lay the geotextile, or something modern, at the lowest point So any time you add something to the environment, before you add it, you add something down below and any time you dig a hole, you put something like a 2014 coin down there so that people who come later know that archaeologists were there and changed the site Good question!

Dani: I’ve also been on sites where everybody involved has signed the bottom of a rock and put it at the bottom of the [], along with an apology for getting their first! So –

Esther: We leave a trowel

Dani: Yeah, yeah.

Geoff: That probably wasn’t planned, though!

Esther: Sometimes on purpose.

Fraser: In fact, actually, there’s a very long archaeological history of this Pitt Rivers, one of the early archaeologists in Britain, had his own medallions cut that he used to place in the base of his excavations and it’s always been a dream of mine that some time I’ll find that he was there before me but there you go.

Peter: We have some more questions.

Fraser: We do. What was the second question on the FutureLearn? OK, so this sort of ties into the first question we picked up, which – this one was posted on the site saying,

‘In an attempt to raise revenue to fund maritime archaeology projects, would it be ethically right that the artefacts recovered from shipwrecks, for where there are duplicate examples, once all originals have been thoroughly recorded and conserved, being loaned out to the general public for a fee?’

It’s a –

Julian: – classic question

Fraser: It is. What do you think Julian?

Julian: I don’t know. It’s a really, really difficult question. It has happened in this country, in Britain, HMS Invincible, which was one of our protected wreck sites, was excavated in the 1980s and they found a huge amount of the ship’s stores had been preserved on the site and were raised, and a selection of them was sent to Chatham and put in the museum there, and the remaining duplicates and everything were sold off after they’d been recorded so, there are precedents for doing it in Britain, within a system of licensees run by the government on protected wreck sites but it’s still a really difficult thing, because your approaches may change in the future and we might want to go back and look at all those things from a different perspective but we can’t because that archive has been dispersed. But, then you could say that by selling off those artefacts, they were able to continue the work on the site, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and we’ve found out more information because of what has gone on.

Ian: The other end of this actually goes hand in hand with the CITES legislation, the protection of endangered species The argument there against legalised sale of ivory is that it will act as a cover for the illegal sale of ivory and if you are getting artefacts purporting to come from one shipwreck on sale, there is absolutely – or, it’s very difficult to stop it being artefacts from another shipwreck, and will just encourage looting

Fraser: I think that’s a really strong argument. I think as an archaeologist keeping completely out of adding any monetary value to cultural heritage, it’s a very important part of what we do, because this argument’s been around for a long time now in terms of what we should do, but by enabling any form of added value to be given to this material we feed into that market because you drive those economic levers, really I think the question was asking a more complicated thing, in that it’s saying, is it OK for these things to be loaned out as display articles, and to charge them? I mean, that might – I don’t have a problem in some ways, in terms of if collections are maintained, managed –

Julian: So we’re keeping the artefacts together. Because it comes back to this idea of commercial exploitation. Well, we’re commercially exploited every time we go to a museum and pay money to get in there, you could argue.

Fraser: Exactly. But if you’re going in just to look at the collection that’s on display then you have to pay.

Geoff: Even though you’ve paid for the museum through your taxes.

Peter: That’s very true, yeah.

Fraser: And that was a very interesting thing here when a number of museums became free, it was very interesting to see the impact in terms of changing use of museums it was very good Peter: Well, actually, real quick. So Dr Paul Johnson at the Smithsonian, who unfortunately is one of our experts who is not appearing on the screen, he says that this public loan of artefacts for a fee was actually tried in South Carolina in the US and it didn’t work unfortunately because people moved, and they died, they lost interest, and some people were robbed. So it simply didn’t work out, unfortunately.

Helen: I guess one thing to think about is the question of insurance of being loaned an artefact. If you’ve got to maintain it and you’ve got to keep it obviously we don’t want to create a monetary value, but these things do obviously have a value – and the conservation itself has a value – so how would it be insured?

Esther: It’s the same when museums loan artefacts to other museums across the country, they are insured and you could probably do the same with private displays

Fraser: and archives as well

All: (general agreement)

Ian: I tend to argue that as the curator of one museum I accept material from another I accept responsibility of curating it properly. The thing that worries me about the dispersal of artefacts to the general public is they don’t have that background. They don’t have that expertise and in fact the artefact could break. OK, if we’re talking about a coin, it’s probably not going to happen, but if you’re talking about any other material wood, clothing, you’ve got serious conservation issues.

Esther: OK. You need to develop a concept for that, but it’s an idea.

Peter: A high profile example, for as far as museums would be the moon rocks. So when NASA brought back moon rocks they distributed a rock to museums all around the world – to state museums and local museums and, by and large, many have gone missing and are unaccounted for.

Ian: About 22 kilos!

Peter: Yes, so nobody knows what happened to them. It’s really interesting.

Crystal: There’s a comment on YouTube.

Fraser: Yeah.

Peter: Alexis Catsambis brings up an interesting – oh sorry…

Crystal: That’s OK. I was just saying that there’s a comment on YouTube from Robert Smith, following the previous question. He thanks us for the answer, but he says he is still not convinced that there are artefacts that can’t be sold so replicas are often put on display as they are in his local Fenland museum and originals are elsewhere despite them being discovered locally.

Fraser: Now that is a constant issue. In terms of distributions between national and local museums and it is very difficult in terms of arguments about where things are… what accessible means and which audiences they are reaching and also the importance of authenticity so does it have to be the original artefact? Is a replica a suitable stand in for the real thing in an archaeological world? And it’s a really complicated issue in terms of what people think about it. I generally like to see things in terms of being close to their context of discovery, but that’s because I’m very fortunate and I do get to travel and I have a privileged position in that way. But I can see the argument that you want to open things up to as many people as possible and therefore moving them to a large centre, which increases their visibility, is a valid way to go forward. So I don’t think, I think we’re all probably going to disagree on this one!

Julian: It becomes complicated with shipwrecks, as well, which might be found in one place but are actually from a totally different end of the earth or place. I’ve also been to a lot of museums in North America and Mexico that have had some brilliant reconstructions of huge sites, like the Lascaux cave paintings and Egyptian carved temples and things which people who are in that museum who probably are never going to get to the other side of the world and it’s much better to see that in some kind of full-size setting I suppose than a little postcard or a picture in a book or something just because of the way you understand the scale of things, so I think there is definitely a place for replicas and reconstructions.

Dani: I think the importance is just that they are labelled as such and that they are acknowledged for what it is so as long as people aren’t trying to pass off a reproduction as the original I don’t have a problem with it either I think it’s a great engagement tool.

Fraser: I think you also, I think people also focus on – the discussions around those sorts of objects tend to focus on the rare and the exceptional. But I think there’s also a lot that can be done with the mundane I think part of the real joy of doing archaeology is contact with material and the importance of context it isn’t just an abstract thing, it is actually the joy of seeing things in their relationship to other things and I think there’s a lot, I think the museum touch tables and things that people engage with are actually really valuable so in some ways I don’t know but maybe we’re a different group of people than in terms of what we do in terms of going into museums but I’d be happy with seeing less overtly special things and some of our curator friends are going to disagree with this but also having more things which are the day-to-day stuff that you can engage with. We’ve still got an element of the cabinet of curiosities rather than of the feely-touchy bit, which is what everyone relates to.

Helen: I think there’s something very special about seeing and being in the presence of the original especially when it has got some age to it if you’re actually there and it’s the original thing and you think ‘Gosh! It’s been a thousand years or a couple of hundred years since this was used’ then that’s amazing!

Geoff: That’s human nature, isn’t it? I mean it’s even more special to be the first person to find it.

Helen: Exactly. Or the first person to touch it.

Geoff: The first person in two thousand years. Fantastic.

Peter: So Alexis Catsambis had an interesting – he brought up an interesting case that happened recently whereby there was a Roman cargo carrying amongst other things a bunch of lead bricks as ballast. And it was recently used for a particle shield at a scientific laboratory, so they took the bricks they were stamped, they cut off the area with the stamps and saved the stamps and then used just the blank lead parts they melted it down and made it into a particle shield So how do you all feel about that? It’s destroying an artefact, however, they were duplicates.

Julian: Did they pay money?

Peter: No?

Julian: Is Roman shipwreck archaeology better funded?

Peter: I don’t believe so, but I believe it was from one state agency to another state agency.

Helen: I do remember that.

Ian: Do they know where the lead came from?

Peter: Yes, they did a full analysis of all the ingots.

Geoff: But this encapsulates this last five minutes of discussion, doesn’t it? What they’ve done is exactly what we were discussing which is hopefully, done all of the archaeology, got all of the knowledge and information out of it and then actually destroyed the artefact. Do we agree with that?

Ian: There’s something missing there. We’ve got all of the knowledge out of it available using the technologies of TODAY.

Peter: Right. You never know what may happen.

Ian: a hundred years down the road…

Peter: Well, a great example of what you just said is that we’ve been doing lead isotope analysis for many years and it wasn’t until the last five years that the National Oceanographic Centre here pioneered what they call a double spike method which is far more accurate than all of the previous examples and so you have this large error from lead isotope analysis prior to this that actually wasn’t very accurate and now we actually can get down to the mine where it came from so if lead artefacts are gone and have been destroyed then that information is gone forever. Who knows what methods we’ll have in the future.

Ian: Absolutely. That’s the big issue.

Fraser: I think that’s it and I think that’s in terms of representative samples how much is a representative sample? These things are… it’s – it is really difficult especially when you’re dealing with difficult resources which also have an environmental impact in terms of extraction It’s a really complicated confluence of issues in that respect and I can certainly have a degree of sympathy with the preservation of a percentage. I like the idea of the removal of the stamps in terms of diagnostic features and samples from those materials yeah, so I’m not unsympathetic to it as an entire project, but it is an interesting one.

Ian: Alternatively if they’ve got the stamps then they can still do advanced isotope analysis on those.

Peter: I actually think it is a great… it’s furthering science in two different fields. I’m actually OK with it and I’m one of the most ardent archaeologists there is.

Julian: Is there a display?

Fraser: I’m sure there isn’t. I really hope there is, but I think you’re right, I think there’s – there’s this other – it’s not part of archaeology – that I think often we don’t do so well at transmitting to the wider world – is that we’re also often more happy with the continued state of material that we encounter something at a particular point in its trajectory of material culture but actually that’s a continuation so its entry into a museum collection is actually only part of that and then it might, there it might be changes of hundred thousand, a hundred years, two hundred years, however many thousand years down the line and that actually we don’t expect things to be static in that sense and so we’re perhaps more flexible than people imagine but it doesn’t change our ethical standpoint and so I think this is where sometimes people feel that we’re playing fast and loose, but actually they are different things in terms of what happens to material and the justification and reason for it

Geoff: There has to be a judgement call doesn’t there. This example about the lead blocks, I mean I’m sure we can all from our professional and interest perspective realise there’s a limited amount of knowledge that you might ever wish to gain from 600 lead blocks.

Peter: And actually, something I forgot to mention is that you can’t just use lead, any lead available, for them to use because lead on the surface has background radiation from the nuclear bombs that have gone off since Hiroshima, so it has to be buried under the water since before then, so very limited supplies of this so it was, you know quite important for the particle shield that this came from this source – from shipwrecks. Something that’s made 20th century vessels underwater has to be quite valuable as a resource because if they’re pre-1944 their steels don’t contain any radiation.

Fraser: OK. We’re actually drawing to a… unbelievably an hour has passed of conversation. Well, I suppose we have one quick question which we should answer from Kevin Murphy as he put something in and this is ‘What happens to shipwrecks that have been unearthed due to the storms at the beginning of the year also winter storms wherever you are, does this not destruct the site and destroy or remove the contextual interest material that we’re interested in? And is it still worth excavating these sites? And again this is sort of a grey area in that I think we’d always say that storms are interesting because they can expose storms can damage, but we don’t know the degree of disruption and just to say that something’s even moved by natural processes doesn’t mean that we can’t construct archaeological significance from the material and their redistribution. There’s always something that we can learn from these things so it might look very destructive but actually we can often find really valuable information In fact, I have some students looking at the impact of storm surges on vessels at the moment because it is really interesting and it has lots of impact from both what could we get from excavating and also in terms of preservation An interesting example of course from the East Winner Bank As Julian knows very well, yeah!

Julian: Yeah, that wreck we didn’t know it was there. Totally new vessel and that was exposed in a different way and is now reburied again and actually I think a piece of it has come up again so I’ve got to go and look at it again next week. But other bits of it are scattered around the sort of countryside nearby which have lost a bit of meaning because we don’t know if they’re actually from that vessel or but the main coherent structure in some ways it was almost perfect because it came up we had a brief chance to go and learn about it identify it and now it’s been buried again If you know of a site like that – get some mates and take a tape measure out there and record it and lots of photographs.

Peter: In North Carolina, in the outer banks, there was a ship that came up during a storm. Popped up and it was just a keel section and a few frames and they were actually able Carolina University went down with students and recorded and they were actually able to reconstruct figure out which ship it was based off the ship construction and the fasteners and I believe it’s the oldest ship found in North Carolina it’s an early 16th or 17th Royal Navy vessel they’re able to reconstruct everything that happened to it. They knew it had disappeared near there, but they were able to reconstruct this entire story of this Royal Navy vessel that went down off North Carolina just from a few bits of timber that popped up out of the sand.

Fraser: Well, in which case I think we will draw things to a close I hope this has been of interest to the people watching and I only apologise to Paul and Alexis for their time and their lack of video/tele presence but we’ll try and make sure that we find ways to correct things if we ever do this again Thank you all for your questions and yes, I hope we answered them.

All: Bye!

A number of minor changes have been made to this transcript to improve its readability.

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Your relationship with the Sea. http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/10/06/relationship-sea/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/10/06/relationship-sea/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2014 08:57:34 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=443 We want to know about your views on maritime archaeology in your part of the world, whether that’s Britain or Bahrain, Europe or Uruguay. One of the most exciting parts of the MOOC for the team at Southampton is the opportunity to hear more about people’s experience of and views about maritime archaeology and maritime heritage around the world. Between …

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800px-Bicheno_Seascape_1

We want to know about your views on maritime archaeology in your part of the world, whether that’s Britain or Bahrain, Europe or Uruguay.

One of the most exciting parts of the MOOC for the team at Southampton is the opportunity to hear more about people’s experience of and views about maritime archaeology and maritime heritage around the world.

Between us we work on quite a few continents, but we’re aware that overall our research – and our personal experience of maritime archaeology – tends to have a European focus. So we’re looking forward to discussions over the next four weeks with the 8000+ people around the world who are doing the course.

As a first step, we’ve put a short survey together. We’re hoping the results can help us tailor our blogposts and our discussions better over the course of the MOOC. We’ll also make sure we get some of the results from the survey back to you in Week Four.

There are 10 questions in the 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/13175

 

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Have you found any gold yet? Misconceptions in Maritime Archaeology http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/09/30/found-gold-yet-misconceptions-maritime-archaeology/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/09/30/found-gold-yet-misconceptions-maritime-archaeology/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2014 17:00:15 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=332 Any field of work attracts misconceptions, but the romance and mystery of maritime archaeology provides the perfect bed for a wide range of assumptions about what maritime archaeology covers, what we can learn through the material record and how we go about making discoveries. What we aren’t Maritime archaeology is the study of people’s changing relationship with the sea and …

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Any field of work attracts misconceptions, but the romance and mystery of maritime archaeology provides the perfect bed for a wide range of assumptions about what maritime archaeology covers, what we can learn through the material record and how we go about making discoveries.

What we aren’t

Maritime archaeology is the study of people’s changing relationship with the sea and connected waterways through material they left behind. As we will see over the coming weeks, this is a broad subject that sees a great deal of different objects and environments falling within our scope of study. However, there are some common misconceptions about where archaeology ends and palaeontology and marine biology begin.

Archaeologists do not study dinosaurs. Some archaeologists, called zooarchaeologists, study the relationship between animals and people through animal bones but even they don’t study dinosaurs. This is because the last of the dinosaurs died about 65 million years ago and the first of the hominids (our human like ancestors) didn’t live until about 5 million years ago. The two could not have overlapped. However, don’t be embarrassed if you thought archaeology might include dinosaurs – it’s a common misconception.

Likewise, while maritime archaeologists do study marine flora and fauna, it is often for different reasons to marine biologists and ecologists, although there is sometimes considerable overlap. For example, we may be interested in what the different sorts of fish preserved on a coastal site indicate about past fishing activities and technology, while ecologists may be interested in what this data tells us about changing distributions of fish species. Equally sea life will often use shipwrecks and submerged sites as artificial reefs. Here we would work with marine biologists and ecologists to study the life present to see if it were impacting on the site in a positive or negative manner.

Finally, the most important thing we are not is motivated by profit through sale of artefacts recovered from the seabed. Tales of sunken gold and treasure chests filled with relics may sound exciting but, for us, the real interest lies in what these materials (in relation to the other finds made on a site, and our broader understanding of the society that was transporting them), tell us about people in the past. We can only gain this understanding if we carefully excavate a site and study the materials recovered as a whole (what we call an assemblage).  Archaeologists work to the principle that the material we recover is the world’s heritage, it is not ours to sell and profit from. Instead we entrust the material recovered to national agencies and museums to allow public access, and to ensure that the entire assemblage remains complete for future study. To some this may sound dull, but we hope we can convince you through this course that what we are is much more exciting than what we are not.

How do we discover things?

You might be surprised the find out that not all maritime archaeology involves diving. There are many different ways that maritime archaeologists can work, often on land, based on boats and frequently making use of advanced computer software. Some sites associated with the sea (such as ports, harbours and anchorages) are intertidal or fully on land, and here we work as any other archaeologist (although perhaps in muddier conditions). As we’ll explore in week two, many of our most exciting discoveries are first made by use of remote sensing technologies that help us to survey large areas of the worlds oceans and seas without getting our feet wet. Other maritime archaeologists work in laboratories, in museums or on public engagement programmes. As such, maritime archaeology is accessible to anyone with an interest, not only those who have a diving qualification.

Southampton maritime archaeology students augering
Southampton maritime archaeology students augering

So what are maritime archaeologists?

George Bass, one of the pioneers of maritime archaeology, famously wrote that how we get to site is unimportant, it’s what we do when we get there that matters. Thus for Bass learning to dive in order to access the shipwrecks he was interested in was just like learning to drive a 4×4 to visit sites in the mountains. So, maritime archaeologists are archaeologists who have developed interests in questions regarding people’s activity on and around the world’s oceans and seas, and who have acquired the skills to answer them. In light of this, we hope that through this course we help many of you to become maritime archaeologists, through fostering your interests and helping you understand how to find out more.

Links

Danielle Newman

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Dutch Schooner the Fenna http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/09/23/dutch-schooner-fenna/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/09/23/dutch-schooner-fenna/#respond Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:51:26 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/?p=345 Dutch Schooner Fenna lost 11th March 1881. Video footage courtesy of New Forest National Park Authority. With thanks to the Maritime Archaeology Trust (formerly The Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology) for the use of their archive footage. The Fenna was a two-masted Dutch schooner of 172 tons constructed of timber in 1863. En route to Italy from the Netherlands, severe …

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Dutch Schooner Fenna lost 11th March 1881. Video footage courtesy of New Forest National Park Authority.

With thanks to the Maritime Archaeology Trust (formerly The Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology) for the use of their archive footage.

Site plan of The Fenna © Maritime Archaeology Trust
Site plan of The Fenna © Maritime Archaeology Trust

The Fenna was a two-masted Dutch schooner of 172 tons constructed of timber in 1863. En route to Italy from the Netherlands, severe weather conditions caused the 18 year old vessel to leak badly. The crew abandoned ship just 30 minutes before she foundered and sank – not to be seen again for over 100 years.

The wreck today has almost gone, but a large percentage of her 230 ton cargo remains intact. Piled on the remains of her wooden deck is an enormous 2.5m pile of what can only be described as neatly stacked ‘railway tracks’. There are also a large quantity of glass sheets, encrusted in the original packing case layout. There are also the remains of nail barrels spread around the wreck. Only a very small number of objects have been raised from the site and declared to the Receiver of Wreck.

Transcript

The Fenna is a Dutch schooner that was lost in March 1881, some two and a half miles south-west of the Needles on the south coast of England.

At the time of its sinking, the ship was sailing from Antwerp to Messina and then onto Trieste in the Mediterranean. It was loaded with a cargo of iron bars, sheets of glass packed up in wooden boxes and barrels of iron nails – possibly for the construction of a pre-fabricated iron and glass building – a bit like the one at Crystal palace in London at the same time.

The vessel sailed into a storm and one of the plank on the outer hull of the vessel sprang away from the hull and he ship began to leak.

The crew were eventually forced to abandon ship some twenty miles off-shore. They get into their rowing boat and then they rowed a long, long way to Bournemouth and then onto Poole.

The wreck is remarkable because although the sides of the ship have long since disappeared, the cargo, as you can see here, is still stacked exactly as it was originally packed in Antwerp, back in 1881.

The site sticks up proud of the seabed (which is otherwise very, very flat) and provides a great haven for marine life as well as providing us with some very, very interesting archaeological remains.

Here you can see some of the last vestiges of the ship surviving – just the bottoms of the frames and the forward part of the vessel. This areas, as you can see from the site-plan here created by the maritime Archaeology Trust, has a large void compared to the other cargo elements, so it’s possible that this was originally the location of some kind of organic cargo on the vessel that has long since degrade away.

The site has also recently been worked on by the New Forest National Park Association, who are responsible for this video.

And here you can see the sheets of glass, exactly packed as they were in Antwerp but without the boxes they were originally held in whose wooden material has long since gone.

The Fenna is really, really interesting because of the well-preserved cargo remains – here we can see the boxes of iron nails – but it’s a very, very ordinary ship. It’s not a transatlantic trading ship, or a big, glamorous warship or anything liek that. It’s really just representative of the normal, ordinary, everyday human activity and trading that was happening in the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay and The Mediterranean at this time.

Further reading about the Fenna

Vessel history and other detailed information

The Fenna site assessment

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Material seas http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/05/08/material-seas/ Thu, 08 May 2014 17:02:17 +0000 http://blog.soton.ac.uk/archaeology/?p=1951     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 …

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800px-Bicheno_Seascape_1

 

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.

phd-23

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.

Water,_sea_(ubt)

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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