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.     

'Giant Strides' in Documentaries, 'Ascents' in Archaeology: Nautical Archaeology's Relationship with and Place within Popular Culture

This article covers 30 years of the representation of nautical archaeology on television. It criticises and positions current research, then develops an objective methodology for examining television documentaries. The relationships and similarities between television documentaries and academia and the wider professional and amateur discipline is debated. Original research, which argues for a structure that is ever-present in nautical archaeology as in popular culture and academia, is deconstructed, and the implications reviewed. A sequence of images is defined and it is demonstrated that this forms a 'unique selling-point' used by both television and the academic discipline.
© 2008 The Author     

A short history of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology

SUMMARY: After 50 years of existence, it is appropriate to review the history of the Society, and appreciate what it has achieved not only through its conferences and publications but also in its success in promoting the archaeology of recent centuries. From a position of rare part-time interest in this period by a few enthusiasts in 1966 we can now celebrate explicit post-medieval specialists within museum, state, local government, contract, and academic archaeology, with representatives active within the Society.     

环境考古

本文以蒙塞拉特岛克雷镇（Clay County MS）亚布鲁（Yarborough）遗址为例对环境考古进行了介绍。作者指出。环境考古对于考古文化及其与自然环境之间的关系的研究有着重要意义。环境考古可以为生物学家、生态学家及土地管理者就如何保护自然资源提供有价值的信息。     

The Archaeology of Poverty and the Poverty of Archaeology

In this Editor’s Introduction to this Special Contribution, I explore some central issues surrounding the archaeology of poverty and ponder why it has taken historical archaeologists so long to “discover” poverty as a research topic.     

The Archaeology of Immateriality

Despite changes in archaeological theory and practice over the past 40 years, most archaeologists are still not very good at acknowledging that “significance” is context-dependent and non-material. In this paper I present two cases studies from New England where archaeologists collaborated with Native peoples on sites that had significant preservation concerns. I evaluate to what extent these projects were successful in their goal of decolonizing archaeology. I call for a definition of materiality that acknowledges that tangible objects and their intangible contexts and meanings are inextricable, and that values are continuously created and recreated in the present by a variety of memory communities.