The Nautical Archaeology of Puerto Rico

The waters of Puerto Rico harbour the remains of thousands of years of human occupation. The island played a key role in the first decades of European exploration of the New World, and its coasts and estuaries have preserved an extensive record of the island's maritime history, before and after the arrival of the Europeans. The objective of this project is to study Puerto Rico's seafaring history through the investigation of its submerged cultural heritage, with a particular focus on the history of European shipbuilding. In 2008 the authors started with survey on the north coast.
© 2009 The Authors     

Shipwreck Identity, Methodology, and Nautical Archaeology

The goal of this essay is to decipher the methods used by nautical archaeologists to create and to apply affiliations or identities to the assemblages they investigate under water. By collating 36 years of data from The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, this author proposes that the methods applied are predominantly intuitive, and are not only susceptible to a variety of interpretive critiques, their intuitive nature also impacts the various historical narratives that the material culture becomes embedded within. The author concludes by arguing that the explication of methods is necessary for the discipline to continue to grow, and proposes that disengaging the identification of ancient and early medieval wrecks from a historical narrative is a route worth exploring.     

Project SAMPHIRE: Crowd Sourcing Maritime Archaeology data off Scotland's West Coast

Perhaps the greatest barrier to effective management of underwater cultural heritage is the lack of data on the nature and location of offshore archaeological resources. This is a problem shared with terrestrial archaeology, but is particularly acute due to the limitations of survey techniques in the underwater environment. In Scotland <15% of known ship losses from the last 200 years have been located and the record is far less comprehensive for earlier periods, verging on a near total data gap. Most known archaeological sites in Scottish waters have been discovered through large-scale sonar survey of relatively low resolution and a considerable bias has been introduced in the archaeological record; this has favored the discovery and documentation of larger and more recent, often upstanding, metal shipwrecks. This article presents the methods and results from a three-year project designed to reduce this bias by demonstrating large-scale prospecting for maritime archaeology through a community-based crowd-sourcing approach. Project SAMPHIRE (the Scottish Atlantic Maritime Past: Heritage, Investigation, Research and Education Project) was geographically focused on the west coast of the Scottish mainland and was undertaken between 2013 and 2015, resulting in a large number of new archaeological discoveries, including shipwrecks, aircraft, and other material of a much more varied nature than what is typically found through large-scale hydrographic surveys.     

Expanding Informal Education in Maritime Archaeology

This paper examines the work of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology (HWTMA) in developing informal education approaches and initiatives. It introduces the aims and ethos of the HWTMA which focuses on embedding education and learning into all aspects of its work, before exploring ways in which its fieldwork and research programme are utilised to help deliver a range of educational opportunities to a diverse range of groups and individuals. There is a review of the possibilities for skill development through practical involvement which is illustrated with case study examples, followed by discussion of broader approaches, including publications, talks and exhibits. This review underpins discussion of a recent project ‘Maritime Archaeology Access and Learning Workshops’ which aimed to ‘educate the educators’, and has demonstrated the potential for this approach to make a significant contribution to increasing the profile of maritime archaeology within informal learning frameworks. The paper concludes by reviewing the experience of these regionally-based initiatives in relation to the expansion of maritime archaeology within the UK and suggests ways that lessons learned could be drawn upon in the development of emerging national approaches.