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Underwater Archaeology with Jessica Irwin - Episode 30
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On this episode we are joined by underwater archaeologist Jessica Irwin. We will discuss what underwater archaeology is, how it differs from terrestrial archaeology, some of the unique challenges faced by underwater archaeologists, and some really cool underwater sites that have been excavated.
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Transcript
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00:00:01
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Introduction to Underwater Archaeology
00:00:48
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Women in Archaeology podcast. My name is Chelsea Slutton and tonight I'm joined by Jessica Irwin and Emily Long. Ladies, thank you so much for coming on the show tonight. It's always amazing to have you. It's great to be here. Perfect. So on tonight's episode, we are going to be talking about underwater archaeology. And Jessica has been kind enough to join us as she is a underwater archaeologist.
00:01:17
Speaker
So I know you've been on the show before, Jessica, but if you wouldn't mind just doing a quick recap of who you are and the type of work that you've done, um, both underwater and terrestrial, if you so choose, um, and then we can move on into what is underwater archeology and how is it different from terrestrial archeology and all of that good stuff.
Jessica Irwin's Underwater Archaeology Work
00:01:43
Speaker
So I am an underwater archaeologist. I work currently in the state of South Carolina. I started out as a terrestrial archaeologist. I think most of us underwater, maritime folks start out in the terrestrial realm and then transition over to the underwater stuff. When I was a terrestrial archaeologist, I did a lot of work with plantations and enslaved peoples and looking at what those kind of lifestyles and pathways looked at.
00:02:13
Speaker
And then as an underwater archaeologist, I wrote my thesis on slave ship construction and how ships can be specifically built for very special purposes and why that makes the slave trade kind of a more diabolical thing than we might think about it. I also do a lot of work with Civil War shipwrecks currently here in South Carolina.
00:02:38
Speaker
big project called the Stone Fleet, Civil War blockade ships that are sunk all over the south. And then I have recently started doing some work with World War II stuff, submerged aircraft wreckage, and helping look at crowdsourced remote sensing material for all over the ocean in terms of looking for sites and identifying sites in places that are really, really hard to access.
00:03:07
Speaker
So that's what I do. And that's kind of how I got into it. So exactly. And that sounds like you've kind of hit a lot of different aspects of underwater archaeology, both in terms of time periods and the things you can can do with it.
Underwater vs. Terrestrial Archaeology
00:03:26
Speaker
So what are what are some of the main differences that you see between kind of underwater archaeology and and terrestrial archaeology?
00:03:36
Speaker
Other than the obvious. Underwater archaeology is underwater. And just to be clear, there's a couple terms for underwater archaeology. There's maritime archaeology, there's nautical archaeology, and there's underwater archaeology.
00:03:53
Speaker
The reason that I call myself an underwater archaeologist is because most of the research in the sites that I do or work on are under the water. As a maritime archaeologist, and I can fit into that category too, you might not necessarily do things that are submerged. You might do a lot of things, shipwrecks on shore or looking at maritime communities or maritime peoples. And so that's where that terrestrial training and underwater training can
00:04:23
Speaker
coincide to look at different types of sites.
Underwater Archaeology Equipment
00:04:28
Speaker
Another big difference between underwater archaeology and terrestrial archaeology is that underwater archaeology, we need a lot more gear to compensate for the work underwater. So it makes the work a lot more expensive. Not to say that terrestrial archaeology can't be very expensive because we know that it is, but
00:04:51
Speaker
The equipment that we use is a lot more complicated because of the underwater environment and the. Well, scuba gear is one part, um, depending on, you know, the site that you're looking at. So most of the sites that I work at are in less than 40 feet of water. So just regular scuba gear that you can get at your local dive shop works for us. The folks who do.
00:05:15
Speaker
really deep sites like some of the sites in Greece and in the Mediterranean they dive on rebreathers and those are a lot more expensive and they take a lot more training outside of our academic training in terms of how we look at archaeological sites. Then if you want to excavate a site you need things like dredges and pumps and boats and terrestrial archaeology you know you need two feet to get there, a shovel, a screen,
00:05:41
Speaker
maybe some more intense equipment depending on where you are, but you can get the things that you need at a hardware store or you can come up with the things that you need relatively easy. It's not the same in underwater archaeology because you can't just go out and buy both. So it makes research institutions the primary folks that are conducting underwater archaeology. So that's one of the big equipment issues.
Communication and Training Challenges
00:06:11
Speaker
And then because you're underwater, you imagine doing archaeology blindfolded in a dark room and you're not allowed to talk to any of the people you're working with. You know, it's great.
00:06:27
Speaker
It's kind of, and it's also like terrestrial archaeology. You know, you go to field school and there's air-conditioned bathrooms and you know, you bring your lunch in and you get to take breaks and talk and maybe there's lessons at night. And then you go out and do CRM and it's like, I haven't showered in three weeks and I'm living in tech. So underwater archaeology can be the same because you go to field school and it's in the Caribbean and there's a hundred feet of visibility.
00:06:53
Speaker
It's tropical and warm and fantastic. I think you get into the professional world of archaeology and you know it's December and you're in a wetsuit and it's 40 degrees outside and there's two inches of visibility as you crab crawl you know down a ballast pile. So the environmental challenges I think are a little bit more extreme just because you can't
00:07:13
Speaker
say, hey, you did that gridline incorrectly. The communication that you have at the beginning of each dive has to be really, really clear and specific so that your team can function in the dark without talking to each other, basically. Are there hand signals or anything of that sort? There are hand signals. And underwater archaeology is
00:07:42
Speaker
There's a lot of trust involved. Not that you don't trust your co-workers when you're doing terrestrial archaeology, but the training that you need to do things underwater is just a lot more extensive.
Survey Methods in Underwater Archaeology
00:07:55
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Most university programs put you through something called AAUS training, the American Academy of Underwater Sciences.
00:08:03
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So you have to be able to rescue your dive buddy. You need to be able to lift them to the surface and administer CPR because there's this added element of danger. So diving already has hand signals. And then before you go down, you kind of say, OK, we're going to focus on this one area, kind of like you would at the beginning of a day of a terrestrial site. And you come up with your hand signals. And that's all great and good. But once you get a dread running,
00:08:31
Speaker
If you can see your hand in front of your face, like that's a really good day. Most of the time you're kind of just like roaming around in the dark and every once in a while you put your hand up to tap to make sure that like your buddy is still next to you, that they're doing okay. Wow. Well that brings up a question for me in particular. I mean I have absolutely no experience in maritime or underwater archaeology whatsoever other than
00:08:58
Speaker
I think it was like the remains of a tugboat or something near the shores of Lake Erie. Just being able to swim out to be like, ooh, there's a boat. But beyond that, like how does survey work in itself? I picture, you know, for me, a long line of people walking across the landscape. Are you swimming in a line? Are you doing the survey in a boat? How does that whole process begin?
Ground-truthing Explained
00:09:27
Speaker
There's a couple different ways that we survey. For the most part, it depends on what you're doing. For academic questions,
00:09:38
Speaker
you might, you know, you might be looking for a specific shipwreck. So your survey would start in historical archives, looking for newspaper articles and journals and things to say, okay, we, you know, they're in 1770, this shipwreck sank off this point, like let's go look for that shipwreck. When you're doing kind of more CRM survey,
00:10:02
Speaker
you might just be surveying in an area because they want to put in a dock structure. So if you're looking for a whole area, we don't swim in a straight line. We have remote sensing technologies that we use. And there's two main remote sensing technologies. And in the past, I'd say 10 years, and really in the past five years, there have been more that have developed that refine that.
00:10:30
Speaker
those surveying techniques. So the two main survey techniques are a sonar and a magnetometer. And a sonar, you might have heard of that from bats in school. It works the same way. We tow a big fish-looking row body thing behind the boat and it sends a signal down and the signal bounces back and it presents us a picture of the bottom of the ocean.
00:10:56
Speaker
And you can see really good shapes. If there's a ballast pile, you'll get this really nice cylindrical shape of that. Or I've seen, you know, more modern ships where you see the silk stacks or the engine housing appears in that sonar image.
00:11:12
Speaker
and then you take the GPS coordinates of exactly where that was and you know you have a site. The other piece of equipment is the magnetometer and again it looks like a big fish and you tow it behind the boat and it takes magnetic readings like a metal detector might on the surface and it doesn't give you the same kind of picture as a sonar would
00:11:36
Speaker
it just gives you pings and you can put those little spikes of a magnetic anomaly. You can overlay it on another map, probably your sonar map, and see where things match up. And so if you have a World War I or World War II ship where most of it's metal, you might get a giant magnetic anomaly. In my work, it's just copper fastenings, maybe copper sheeting on a ship, not much. So you get smaller pings and then they overlap with
00:12:03
Speaker
a sonar image, hopefully, and you might have a site there. And then the final step of that, which I guess would kind of be like phase one equivalent, is you ground truth. So that's when you get your dive gear and you dive off the side of the boat and you go down and you say, oh, hey, this is a shipwreck. Hooray. Or, oh, hey, somebody is then dumping tires here to make a fishing hole or something.
00:12:31
Speaker
But a lot of our survey work we do in an office. We look at, you know, nautical charts, note obstructions that, you know, are in channel ways and ship ways. Where have they put artificial reefs in? Where are their, you know, new sandbars going to be? Because they just dredged out an area.
00:12:53
Speaker
And some of those techniques don't work in certain places. I did some work in Bermuda and the reef structure there is volcanic.
00:13:03
Speaker
the magnetometer and the sonar just don't work. So there we kind of do more traditional thing called toe-boarding where you literally get dragged behind a boat and you look down at the water and when you see something you let go and then everyone comes and investigates it. So oh wow. We have some really abusing high technology that we can use and then we have some old-school
00:13:27
Speaker
you know, get dragged behind a boat technology. There's been a lot of development in both IBM, Sonar, and there's all sorts of crazy stuff going on. There's someone in Albania trying to develop an underwater iPad. There's people that are, you know, trying to develop autonomous survey robots so that you don't have to tow it behind a boat, that you can just program in it and does it all itself. So
00:13:54
Speaker
There's things that are going to change going forward, but those are kind of the basic survey methods. And like you said, you do a lot of work in the office beforehand. Out of curiosity, are most shipwrecks generally already known about? Or if there's an idea like it's somewhere within this many square miles and then you go look for it, are there still a lot of unknowns out there that wouldn't even be in a historical document?
Potential Discoveries in Underwater Archaeology
00:14:23
Speaker
that type of thing. Is there still a lot of unknown out there? There's so much unknown. I just read a statistic that said there's 3 million potential shipwrecks in the historic record. And that's not including, you know, before the historic record. And that's also not including things that are becoming more and more interesting. So
00:14:48
Speaker
Yes, it's really exciting to think that you're going to go and find Columbus's ship that sank when he was exploring, et cetera, et cetera. But there's also amazing handmade craft that, you know, indigenous populations have been making for thousands of years before any kind of colonization. And then there is the ingenuity of people who live on the coast, you know, who come up with these vessels to they call it going coasting when you're just going up and down the coast to trade goods.
00:15:17
Speaker
before there's railroads and a really good road infrastructure to do your trading. And some of these vessels are so ingenious, but when we try to think of them today, it's not something that is in our normal kind of way, what we think about boats. And then there's also things that you think you would know about, but then we just as humans collectively forget. So that's part of the stone fleet that we're working on here in South Carolina is they sunk
00:15:47
Speaker
40 plus ships, but people just kind of forget about it. It just falls away from our collective knowledge and then we need to go back out and rediscover those things. So there is no end of shipwrecks anytime soon. And other than the Titanic, I don't think that our field has really even started exploring the deep ocean, which is a whole other challenge. So that is so cool. I guess one thing that I always wondered about in terms of
00:16:16
Speaker
underwater archaeology and a second point that is just one that I want to hammer out home. But my question is, I've always wondered, I've looked at some underwater archaeology kind of field school is because I think that it would be an interesting skill to learn. And we're doing more and more with underwater archaeology and I think that
00:16:42
Speaker
In terms of employability, it might be a good thing to have on your resume, but looking at a lot of the underwater field schools, you know, some of the certifications that you, I mean, you have to have a PADI license or this or that. How many underwater archaeologists are kind of like scuba divers who are looking for a way to get paid to scuba dive? You know, and what percentage are archaeologists who learn how to scuba dive?
00:17:10
Speaker
I think there's more archaeologists that learn how to scuba dive than scuba divers who become archaeologists.
00:17:18
Speaker
I often feel that being an archaeologist is kind of like being what being an actor and actress must be like, where you hear no a lot before you hear yes. Where you apply for a lot of jobs and you don't make a lot of money before you get those kind of yes answers. The other thing with scuba divers who want to become archaeologists because they want to get paid to scuba is that
00:17:45
Speaker
Archaeologists who are trained as archaeologists first know that the archaeology isn't about the stuff. And for a lot of people who are scuba diving first, they feel like, oh, I want to go find treasure. I want to look at cool stuff. And so that's why they start pursuing archaeology and the realization that the things that they find they're not going to be able to keep, or they're not going to get rich from them, kind of deters them from the field. There are really amazing
00:18:13
Speaker
who were scuba divers, who became historians, who then became archaeologists, because they were so excited about the things that they were seeing or finding underwater that it just drove a passion in them. But I think it's really hard for a lot of people who aren't trained first to see the value of one pipe stem on a shipwreck could potentially date the entire shipwreck, where they're just like, oh, look at this cool thing I found.
00:18:41
Speaker
there's not a ton of people who are scuba divers first. Sure. And then the kind of point that I wanted to hammer home, I know in terrestrial archaeology, you have a lot of issues with preservation, particularly if you're more organic kind of materials, wood, cloth, that sort of thing. And then oftentimes you get these shipwrecks that are completely made out of wood in some cases.
00:19:10
Speaker
And the environment underwater is obviously very different than the environment up here. But I think there are both a lot of good potential to find things that we wouldn't normally find in the archaeological record underwater. But I think there are also a lot of issues in terms of preservation, if things have been completely
00:19:39
Speaker
submerged in saltwater for 300 years. And that's just the little bits that I pick up from here and there, the couple articles that you read or get assigned to in class. I'm definitely not an underwater archaeologist.
Conservation Planning
00:19:56
Speaker
But if you could touch on- Conservation is a huge part of your training.
00:20:01
Speaker
And there's people who specialize just in underwater conservation. And I will admittedly say that many of them come from foreign universities and that a lot of places do a much better job of training conservationists than we do here in the United States. One of the things that, again, costs a lot of money and is a little different from terrestrial archaeology is that
00:20:25
Speaker
You, as an archaeologist, when you're doing anything, you cannot bring anything to the surface unless you have a conservation plan, space for that thing to be conserved, money for that thing to be conserved, and a place for it to live in perpetuity. So that's a kill of fish. Yeah. So we don't, like when I find something, if I'm looking at a shipwreck, it's been there for 300 years. It's doing just fine where it is.
00:20:55
Speaker
I don't touch it and I just document it, it's better off where it is than if I take it up. When you make a decision to bring something up, you need to bring it up from the bottom, it needs to go straight into water, it needs to go to the place that it's going to be conserved.
00:21:13
Speaker
You have to think of all those things before, which makes the survey and the ground true thing really important. And then rather than start excavation, a lot of times we'll do a huge site map with site documentation. And then when excavation does occur, it might only be one unit or two units.
00:21:31
Speaker
just to kind of get an idea of like how much hole structure is under this ballast pile or how deep is this sediment and is this something that we want to really pursue and then there are things that you know they do have the money for they do pull it up and have really interesting and in South Carolina that's the Hanley but they did not touch that submarine until they had the facilities built to get it conserved
00:21:57
Speaker
They have the money and the staff and everything that they would need to take care of it. So conservation is a huge challenge. And that's another one of those things where a scuba diver might see something underwater and say, oh my gosh, this is so amazing. It's a sword or a musket. I'm going to take it home and keep it forever. And then within a month, it's just a pile of rusty dust because the principles of conservation
00:22:20
Speaker
you know, are just lost on the lay person or, you know, they didn't have, you know, you don't have the ability to do electrolytic reduction on a piece of iron in your house. You need to do that in a lab. So conservation is a big obstacle and a very expensive one, which is why there's not a lot of Hunleys or Vasas or other big famous shipwrecks that you can just go and look at. That is good. Good to know.
00:22:47
Speaker
and definitely very different from terrestrial archeology where you take stuff up and take it home. I don't necessarily always have a conservation plan and we could probably take a page out of the underwater book and be a little bit better about that, terrestrially. I think that just about brings us to the end of our first segment and I think it'll be a great kind of transition point in the next 20 minutes to talk about some of these really, really amazing sites and case studies that you just mentioned.
00:23:17
Speaker
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00:23:43
Speaker
Check them out online at SFUHRM archaeology. Spots are filling up for next fall's cohort, so apply today. Hello and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. On tonight's episode, we have been discussing underwater archaeology. Jessica Irwin has joined us to tell us all about her work on that, which we're super grateful for. In the last 20 minutes, we were talking about kind of what underwater archaeology is, how it's different from
00:24:11
Speaker
terrestrial archaeology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And in this section, we are going to move on to some of the really cool things that have been found through underwater archaeology and some of the really great case studies. I think, Jessica, you had mentioned a particular submarine that's been found off the coast of South Carolina. Yeah, so the Hunley is
00:24:38
Speaker
the South's favorite submarine. It was a Confederate submarine.
The Hunley: A Case Study
00:24:44
Speaker
It is the first submarine that ever sank another ship and it never resurfaced. And so the thing
00:24:53
Speaker
people held on to this idea of the Hunley for a really long time and a lot of people looked for it. And then the Army Corps of Engineers decided to put in a nice shipping channel so that Charleston could benefit from global commercialization and there was a feeling that the Hunley was never going to be found again.
00:25:13
Speaker
And so using some of the techniques that we talked about earlier, some researchers found this magnetic anomaly and brought in archeologists and all sorts of other people and figured out, dove down, took a look at this thing and said, yes, this is the Hunley. Actually the man who figured, who was the first person to touch it and say, this is the Hunley, his name is Joe Beatty and he is retiring after 40 years at the end of the month.
00:25:42
Speaker
you know this was a long time project. So they found it and told the state of South Carolina about it and the state put together a commission to build a beautiful conservation facility with Clemson University and they got National Geographic involved and
00:26:00
Speaker
anything that sunk during the Civil War or any Civil Warships technically still belonged to the United States Navy. So the Navy came down with Navy divers and they dredged the submarine out and it was listed at an angle. So they lifted it up and took it over to the conservation facility. Um, it was full of sediment. And so once they got to the conservation facility, they excavated the interior of the Hunley, just like you would a terrestrial site. And
00:26:28
Speaker
because that heavy sandy, like muddy sediment is very anaerobic, which, so there's no oxygen in there. They were able to find amazing artifacts. They found skeletal remains of all of the crew. Um, they were able to do facial reconstructions of the crew. They, after they did 3d scans and all sorts of other things, they reinterred the crew and had a whole ceremony of burial for them. But,
00:26:57
Speaker
Once it was excavated, they started doing conservation on the actual submarine itself, the metal, and they hired a geologist to look at the incrustation, to measure it, to see how the currents were affecting it after it had sank.
00:27:13
Speaker
They've just started to remove the incrustation from the interior of the Hanli and they are finding fabric from these men's uniforms. They are finding jewelry, wedding rings, shoe pieces, just really amazing preservation because
00:27:34
Speaker
Once things are underwater and the sand goes over them, if there's not a lot of movement, those things preserve really well. And so they've been able to do all this research. But in addition to that,
00:27:48
Speaker
You know, there was some written records about the Hunley, but not necessarily how the steering mechanism worked or how they constructed it or how many rivets they put in it or, you know, all of these kind of really simple questions that you would think, you know, now, if they were to build a submarine, there would be these amazing plans and all the worker on a roll and all these kind of things. And so they're answering those questions as well. So that's the one that everyone likes down here in the South. And it's a pretty cool story.
00:28:18
Speaker
And the ship that it sank, the Houston Tonic, is actually still out in Charleston Harbor and eventually
00:28:25
Speaker
There's some plans to go out and look at it to see, you know, how the humly actually sank it and how the explosives affected the ship and how long it took to go down. But it goes back to that preservation question. There's not, you know, the time or the space to preserve the things that we would bring up from the Houston Tonic until the humly is completely finished. So once the humly is finished, then we can go
00:28:48
Speaker
do some more and get some more Houstonic stuff to kind of complete the whole story of that night when the Hunley say Houstonic. So that's a really cool site that I like. But because I think a lot of people don't realize how much is in the United States. When you hear shipwrecks, it's kind of like, oh, Spanish, a Spanish galleon or a Viking longship or, you know, ships from from Europe or
00:29:16
Speaker
different areas like that. And I think it's great that there are some wonderful examples in the United States where it's like, yeah, there's some amazing things right in our backyard.
Significant U.S. Shipwrecks
00:29:25
Speaker
Well, George Vash, he was the godfather of underwater archaeology. He kind of developed all of the methods and how we do everything. And he worked in the Mediterranean. And he took a very specific approach because one, there's clear water there and he could go back like season after season after season and really explore shipwrecks in depth.
00:29:46
Speaker
And in the United States, the kind of place that we have that's like that, even though it's freezing and not warm, like if you were in Greece, is the Great Lakes. And so up in the Great Lakes, there was shipping going on commercially and industrially for a really long time. And those lakes, when you get a wind on them, they can be as rough and choppy as the ocean. So there's ships at the bottom of the Great Lakes that looked like a toy ship that you just set on the bottom of the lake.
00:30:15
Speaker
Yeah, like the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Edmund Fitzgerald is definitely one of the most famous ones. But there's hundreds more up there. There's ones that haven't even been discovered. And then there's a cool phenomena. Well, it's sad and cool. But where as ships became out of commission or old or too expensive to repair, they would all get taken to a boneyard.
00:30:43
Speaker
And so you could go and get parts for your ship or boat from that boneyard. And then the boneyards would just be abandoned. And so there's, you know, hundreds of holes lined up side by side right next to each other that have just been left forgotten. And, you know, they're just there waiting to be researched or looked at or studied. There's some in the Great Lakes. I know there's ones in Virginia. There's World War I boneyards. There's World War II boneyards. There's boneyards from, you know, every phase of major shipping.
00:31:11
Speaker
So there's a lot out there in the United States. Yeah. So on the subject of the Great Lakes, I was watching on TV, and I can't remember what channel it was. And since it was on TV, the actual truthfulness of it is debatable. But with some issues that global warming has caused, particularly in the Great Lakes where
00:31:40
Speaker
The water is now warmer, so they're getting different types of algae or something in the water that is having some negative impacts on some of the preservations that can be seen. True, false.
00:31:55
Speaker
True. OK. There's a couple of things that have happened in the Great Lakes. One is there is a pollution factor, obviously, just like every other body of water. And as more and more people build on the shoreline, it stabilizes the shoreline, it changes the clarity of the water. All those environmental things that affect the lake also affect archaeological sites. Invasive species.
00:32:23
Speaker
I haven't personally dove to see this, but I have heard about it and I know up at Thunder Bay, which is a sanctuary up there, they see this all the time. There's, I think it's like a muscle or like a mollus. Zebra mussels? Yes, zebra mussels, thank you.
00:32:41
Speaker
We're introduced from recreational boaters who were boating somewhere else who didn't do a good job of washing their boat. They bring those over and they have no natural predators now and they love wood. So all of these beautiful, perfectly preserved, you know, wood hole vessels are just covered in zebra mussels and they're just eating away at it. And then also with global warming, you know, you get
00:33:07
Speaker
The depth change, you get the water temperature change, new algaes are introduced. People release their fish into the lake or people release stock fish thinking, oh, it's going to help the fishing industry. And all of these things have a negative impact on the preservation of this deep, cold, clear, fresh water, which is kind of like the ideal preservation for anything underwater. No oxygen.
00:33:36
Speaker
deep so people can't get to it, cold so it's like a freezer, and fresh water so you don't have salt inundation. So unfortunately we don't know how long those sites up there will last but they're working on it. They have a lot of initiatives to try to eliminate some of those invasive species. Depending on what, I guess who is adding
00:34:02
Speaker
Some of these species, not necessarily I did a bad job cleaning my boat, but releasing fish and things. I think some of that is actually illegal as well. Yes. You know, to do without being an appropriately sanctioned human being. Well, and some of it's accidental too. I know there was some issues with the water flow through channels between each lake and, you know, that
00:34:27
Speaker
pushing the commercial aspect of it forward, you know, they connected all the lakes and they dug this channel to the ocean and things like that. And underwater archaeology hasn't is a relatively new field of archaeology. It really has only been around since, you know, late 60s, early 70s and didn't really take off until, you know, the mid 80s as an archaeological subdivision. And so these weren't things that people were thinking about.
00:34:58
Speaker
Um, so, you know, things happen, you can't go back, it's unfortunate, but especially up at Thunder Bay because it is a sanctuary, they're doing a really good job of trying to mitigate some of these problems, but there's some things that you just can't fix, unfortunately. The other interesting, like, fresh, not necessarily fresh water, but cold blue water sites end up being, you know, in the far north or, um,
Local Knowledge and Indigenous Perspectives
00:35:25
Speaker
Northern Europe off of I just read about a like a ship that sank in like the 1620s that they excavated off of the Netherlands that had like dresses like full-blown what women's dresses that they were able to bring up and preserve and they researched the dressmaker and that's how they were able to identify this ship and it was
00:35:51
Speaker
the queens, ladies-in-waiting trying to steal the crown jewels from England to go and sell them to support whatever military operation was going on at the time. So there's also really amazing preservation in cold water. And there can be in tropics too, and obviously the tropics are more pleasant to dive in. Sure. So kind of going back to touch on the northern
00:36:21
Speaker
kind of Arctic ships that preserve really well and have been found, I know recently past year, year and a half, or at least it was published in the past year, year and a half. The second of the two ships from the Franklin expedition was found up in Canada, and that was the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, and I believe it was the Terror that was somewhat recently found.
00:36:49
Speaker
And they've been doing interesting things, looking at the DNA of the individuals on board, both to try and maybe look for some familial members that are still alive today, but also realizing that some of the women who were on that expedition were women. Surprise. Yeah. And whether or not it was known that they were women when they signed up or whether
00:37:19
Speaker
The history of women pretending to be men to go join in wars is long. But one of the big things about finding that particular site was that there was an indigenous aspect to that.
00:37:37
Speaker
and that when they were looking for the ship, there was an indigenous person who said, oh yeah, I go seal hunting out there 10 years ago and I can tell you exactly where there was this big wooden thing sticking out of the ice, the big wooden thing being the mast. And to
00:38:02
Speaker
to what degree is both like indigenous, but also local oral knowledge being utilized to help identify some of these sites? I think most, and I'm sure that like I would get a lot of debate about this in certain circles, but I think that most of the really major sites have been, or I shouldn't say major, some of the pivotal like, you know,
00:38:31
Speaker
changing sites have been identified by local fishermen, people who live in the communities. One of the big sites in Greece was found by sponge divers. There are sites in
00:38:49
Speaker
the Caribbean where local fishermen and local freedivers know exactly where they are, go there time after time. And then when they're finally asked about them, you know, you feel really silly because they're like, Oh yeah, of course. Like I could have told you that you've been looking for that for three years. Like I could have told you exactly where that was. Um, and then, you know, here where, where I live in South Carolina, because the water has such poor visibility,
00:39:16
Speaker
We do talk to the fishermen a lot, especially the shrimp trawlers, because they know exactly where their net is going to snag. They know exactly where the hazards are. I did a survey not too long ago in a neighborhood because a bunch of shrimp trawler captains live there, and they all have these historic anchors sitting in their front yards from things that have come up in their net, and they just use them as lawn ornaments.
00:39:42
Speaker
You know, we went around and we asked them if they remembered where they got them from and tried to match them to some coordinates of known sites that we know and if we could measure them and document them and those kind of things. And they're happy to tell us and happy to work with us. So I think a good portion of it, you know, some really significant sites that divers can actually access do come from local knowledge. And then on the flip side, there are some that are just
00:40:09
Speaker
completely forgotten and invaded. And that's when you really have to try to jump into the archives and hope that someone thought it was important enough to give some more details or location information about a site that could potentially be really interesting or paradigm shifting in a region. And just speaking of significant sites, or significant shipwrecks, do you have a favorite?
00:40:37
Speaker
either one that you've been to or one that you've read about. I think one of the sites that initially really excited me in underwater archaeology was the Lavelle which is a site in Texas and it was LaSalle, one of LaSalle's ships on his last voyage and he
00:41:00
Speaker
A bunch of his ships wrecked and all of the survivors, he just kind of left on the Gulf Coast and was like, oh, I'll come back and see if I can find you. And basically they all died. Um, he came back and there was, or he didn't come back. And so anyway, they found one of his ships and built a cofferdam around it in the Gulf of Mexico so that they could excavate it like as you would a terrestrial site and
00:41:27
Speaker
One of the things that a lot of when you're transitioning from terrestrial to underwater archaeology that you have to kind of give up is a lot of that vertical control. And a lot of those, you know, like a paleo site, you might only see because there's some post holes or there's a fire pit feature or it's, you know, subtle coloration and sediment. You don't have the underwater. So for them to do this was kind of amazing and
00:41:54
Speaker
obviously very expensive, but they were able to conserve a lot of items, but they found human remains in a rope coil of one of the shipmates, but they found rope and fabric and food and, you know, all these delicate organics because they were able to do this. And so that site has a very special place in my heart just because it's just so mind boggling. That is really cool. So did they want to
00:42:24
Speaker
do it with this kind of dam around it so that they could do some of the the vertical information or was there a visibility issue was the water too rough like why why did they decide to do it that way? I think it was a visibility issue but also they wanted to be able to excavate it with that kind of intricacy and then also
00:42:48
Speaker
A copper dam, you know, you can't have excessively choppy water. So putting that up in the Gulf of Mexico, not during hurricane season, was kind of the best way to experiment if this method applied to shipwrecks would work.
00:43:05
Speaker
You can't do that here. The waves on any given day change from nothing, dead flat, to six to eight feet. You can't do that in the Mediterranean because a storm can just come up and then flood your cofferdam with water. So I think it was kind of a right time, right place, let's experiment with this and see what we can do. And also, West Owl was a fairly significant explorer.
00:43:34
Speaker
I think the ship sank, um, you know, 300 plus years ago. So it was in one of the older ship wrecks in the Western hemisphere. So it was just, you know, a good, good experiment for them to try. Yeah. So that's really interesting. And actually that just about brings us to the end of our second segment. So it sounds like there are, um,
00:44:03
Speaker
Lots of different types of underwater archaeology that you can do and some great examples of things that have been found and recovered and preserved, but also some really tantalizing scraps of information about what could come out next. But I think when we come back, we might move on to some of the complexities, shall we say, around doing this kind of work.
00:45:01
Speaker
Now let's get back to the show.
00:45:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. Tonight we have been discussing underwater archaeology and so far on this episode we've done the kind of what is it, how is it different from terrestrial archaeology and we have also talked about some really amazing case studies that have been
00:45:32
Speaker
discovered and excavated or are known about and we're super excited to see what comes out of their eventual excavation and further investigation. But I think we're going to move on to some of the real challenges in underwater archaeology.
00:45:55
Speaker
So, I mean, money obviously is part of it. Is it, you know, we've kind of discussed, there's, it's expensive and- Reservation extravaganza. Yeah, the conservation issues. And, you know, we've got safety issues and I mean, it seems like there's just a lot going on. But in the break, we had mentioned a little bit some of the difficulties that can come with some of the legislation around
00:46:26
Speaker
or lack of legislation around underwater archaeology and what is permissible for non-archaeologists to do on these sites. And if you want to talk a little bit more about that, Jessica? Yeah. One of the things that is a constant challenge for archaeologists, the world over are really in terms of underwater landscapes and underwater sites is who owns the sea and who gives you the right
00:46:56
Speaker
Or who can give you permission to go and excavate a site and to take the things from that site? Who has ownership of those? And so for some of it, it's really cut and dry. For example, not that everyone listens to this, but if the United States naval vessel sinks,
00:47:15
Speaker
It does not matter how much time passes. That vessel always belongs to the United States Navy. It doesn't matter where it sank, what waters it's in, etc. It belongs to the Navy. If you want to touch it, you need to go through the Navy. And that idea kind of of the law, the sea and admiralty laws extends to other countries as well.
00:47:39
Speaker
You know, the idea is that if there was a British ship that sank here, it would still belong to the Queen of England. And it's a good idea in theory and it doesn't always work in practice because it brings up the idea of, you know, how do you prove that that ship is the ship that you say it is without doing excavation or without doing archaeology? And then there's the other component of, you know, like any other archaeological site,
00:48:04
Speaker
Why is it important? Why does it matter if we put dynamite on this site in the Caribbean because we want the treasure that's within? So it's a constant battle of arguing for ownership and preservation and why archaeology is important and why it's important for us to ask these questions. Some of the laws make sense when you look at them on a small scale level, for example,
00:48:34
Speaker
There are some places in the Caribbean on the coast of Africa where salvaging is a part of that economy and it's been a part of that economy for a really long time. And so those people feel and are entitled to do with their marine resources what they want.
00:48:53
Speaker
On the other side of that, you have just flat out treasure hunters who, for whatever reason, think that they're gonna become bazillionaires for finding a shipwreck. And I can tell you right now, the only people who have ever become rich for finding a shipwreck don't become rich off of finding the shipwreck. They become rich for defrauding their investors that they told were gonna become rich for finding a shipwreck. So those are some of the legal boundaries. In an ideal world, obviously,
00:49:22
Speaker
No one would touch the shipwrecks. We would get in there academically and look at them. But a lot of people who really care about them, who don't have the kind of academic training, look at it and say, if we don't save it, it's going to wash away. And arguing that, you know, it's been there for a couple hundred years, like it's probably going to be OK. You know, they have a vested interest in the historical nature of it, so they want to save it.
00:49:44
Speaker
And so when laws and things come up, they want it to be that we have to save everything. And as scientists, we have to say, you know, do we have a statistically significant sample from that ship so that we can do the research we want to do, or do we leave it in place?
00:50:04
Speaker
And then the other big thing for archaeologists here is the United States hasn't ratified at the 2001 UNESCO Convention, which makes underwater archaeological sites more protected. And if you want to read more about that, there's a bunch of great articles on a site called maritimearchaeology.com that's run by a guy named Peter Campbell. He's a PhD out of Southampton, and he has really explored that topic in detail. So I won't get into it because I won't say it as well as he does.
00:50:34
Speaker
Fair enough. Well, that's frustrating. I mean, it sounds like it's, I mean, a pretty similar issue that we have with terrestrial archaeology, only that terrestrial archaeology may have a few more protections that I honestly hadn't considered. That, oh, we have a few more laws that make it a little easier to protect, as opposed to something that's underwater, where, who does it belong to? It's just, it's an interesting thing I never thought of. Well, I think, too, with a lot of sensitive terrestrial archaeology sites,
00:51:04
Speaker
There's people who have a vested interest in protecting them as their own personal heritage. So, you know, the fight going on right now with different monuments. There are native, you know, groups who are interested in protecting that because that's directly related to their cultural heritage. And with the exception of, you know, military war vessels where maybe there's people who, you know, passed away on those vessels or
00:51:32
Speaker
ships that are related to marooned communities where a shipwrecked there on an island with no people and those shipwrecked survivors were able to kind of create their own community there. It's hard to sometimes give that direct correlation to give people the motivation to preserve a shipwreck. And hopefully that will change as new things develop. One of the new fields that's kind of developing in archaeology is submerged paleo landscapes.
00:52:00
Speaker
the last glacial maximum obviously had a lot more of our coastline exposed and underwater archaeologists are hoping that a lot of those big migration questions and like when was the, you know, western hemisphere populated, like maybe some of those answers are like waiting for us underwater. So things might change and that might interest people in preserving these sites a little bit more. But in the meantime, it's hard to
00:52:29
Speaker
directly correlate a shipwreck or a submerged site to someone's heritage. Going in a bit of a different direction in terms of challenges, I was wondering if you've had many challenges and if you know if any of your co-workers have had challenges as women.
Gender Representation in Underwater Archaeology
00:52:49
Speaker
Is there decent representation of women in the field of underwater archaeology or has that been an issue
00:52:57
Speaker
that's slowly changing or something that you find has changed, et cetera, et cetera. I think, you know, there have always been women in underwater archaeology. You'll be hard pressed to find very many women who are the leaders in underwater archaeology, and it's definitely changing, but there is a bias
00:53:25
Speaker
I feel personally towards women. And part of it is the nature of underwater archaeology. For example, you know, I have a daughter. I had to take a year off of diving because you can't scuba dive when you're pregnant. And so that can be really a hindrance to a team where you've spent all this time building trust to work together in a really dynamic environment. There is also
00:53:54
Speaker
you know, there's just not a lot of jobs or positions, I guess, full time permanent kind of jobs that we, you know, would all love to have in underwater archaeology. And so when you go and look at the number of students who are entering
00:54:11
Speaker
graduate master's programs in maritime archaeology versus the number of women who are currently employed, and then looking at the number of people who are employed in the top echelons of underwater archaeology, the majority of students are women, but then the majority of those people who are employed are men, and then there's relatively zero women to speak of in the top echelons of underwater archaeology.
00:54:37
Speaker
You know, it is changing slowly, but it hasn't quite changed yet. But I think that we might be in for a tide change here really soon. There's been a couple of really amazing panels and discussions and papers about this specific topic. And we finally, I think, have some really bold women who aren't afraid of kind of the political and career repercussions of saying
00:55:04
Speaker
This isn't fair and there should be more women and you should give women a chance and the kind of misogynistic views that have been held for a long time need to go away if you want to keep getting, you know, federal contracts, et cetera. Right. And I think that's a direction that kind of the broader world of archaeology is also heading in.
00:55:26
Speaker
In that there are more female students, the leadership is more male, but we are seeing more female PIs, more female leaders of CRM crews, that sort of thing. Slowly but surely. Yes. I think too, just like on another random side note,
00:55:47
Speaker
Being a girl on a boat with a bunch of men, there's just things you have to figure out. And I won't get into them because we don't really need to go that way. But if you're going to be the only chick on a boat full of dudes, you just have to really own it and just go for it. And so I think that's one of the other things that's kind of slowly changing, is that the guys are becoming less sensitive to those things.
00:56:11
Speaker
And more accommodating in terms of yeah, you might be in tight living quarters for two weeks on a boat during a survey and you're driving straight lines back and forth and Yeah, there's a girl here. Okay, that's just how it's gonna be. So Same thing with turret. I think so much of this crosses back and forth with terrestrial archaeology to you. We're just
00:56:32
Speaker
A group of guys having to deal with the fact that if I have to, you know, change a pad or go to the bathroom, it's not an, eww, girl thing. It's literally just this, just the thing. And I'm like, okay, I'll just turn around and I'm like, thanks, okay. Yeah, it takes a little bit, but I think a lot of, I think it's a generational thing too. And the education level of archaeologists is changing as well, as it did for terrestrial just, you know,
00:56:59
Speaker
30 years before where you could become an archaeologist without any kind of formal education. And as those folks who just kind of fell into archaeology, especially underwater archaeology, are leaving the field, a lot of the kind of bias is also going with them. Not 100%, obviously. It never will be gone 100%, I'm sure. But we can hope. And do you see this bias changing too in terms of different types of interpreting underwater archaeological sites from
00:57:28
Speaker
You're saying you're studying slave ships and looking at the archaeology of inequality and whatnot and views of women and so forth. Are you seeing interpretations changing as well?
00:57:40
Speaker
I don't think that we're quite at the same place that the terrestrial site is. I think it is slowly changing as we introduce more researchers. And I've talked about how expensive underwater archaeology can be, which means that a lot of graduate students are revisiting collections and looking at collections that have been conserved to do their thesis work. And so some of those things are changing.
00:58:08
Speaker
I think part of the reason it's not changing as quickly as it is elsewhere is that a huge component of underwater archaeology and ships has to do with warfare. And even though we know that there were women Vikings and I am sure that there were women on Greek warships and all of those kind of things because
00:58:33
Speaker
in the United States industrial complex and what we associate with war is most commonly World War II and Vietnam and there were not women soldiers and there were not women you know in the Navy it's that thought of is there women there just kind of gets pushed to the side. Part of the change is coming from looking at
00:58:54
Speaker
colonial age vessels. Obviously they're probably women colonists, otherwise we wouldn't be here. Some of those things are changing, but it's just a slow sea change.
Focus of Shipwreck Research
00:59:08
Speaker
And the other part is underwater archaeology can be really research question driven because you only have a certain number of dives and a certain number of time. So you want to answer the specific question you're out there to answer. And so many times the question that you're trying to answer is just
00:59:25
Speaker
What shipwreck is this? And it doesn't leave a lot of time to go back and look at the trade goods or how people lived on the ship. That's another question down the road when you've secured more space and time and people. So we're getting there, but it's a slower roll. It's interesting. Yeah, guns. They're exciting. Cannons? Can't beat them.
00:59:53
Speaker
I'm sure they preserve well, too. Oh my gosh. Yeah, but they're the most intense thing to preserve, so art can be served. But they stay. People can't steal cannons off of a shipwreck site. They're heavy. So that's one good thing. Yeah. I'm guessing that's a challenge going back to just the term in terms of protecting shipwrecks, that whole idea that they must be full of Spanish gold.
01:00:22
Speaker
tearing them apart just to get at whatever fancy bits you can get. It's like, nope, just cannons. The Spanish Bowl thing is really hilarious, actually, because it comes from just one account. One account of Spanish treasure ships leaving South America and sinking. And that one account
01:00:45
Speaker
you know was really famous at the time it was famous because all of this gold sank and disappeared and it has stayed famous for a very long time and so people think that every single ship is gonna have treasure on it and that when you go to look at a ship you're looking for the treasure like what are you looking at one of my best friends in grad school she did her thesis
01:01:04
Speaker
shipwreck that was called the iron plate wreck because that was what was on it was iron plate that was being moved industrially and then later in found out some interesting other things with Irish immigrants and
01:01:20
Speaker
All sorts of like, you know, it had a very interesting story, but that shipwreck, the reason we were able to study it was because the treasure hunters who had scavenged the area were not interested in the iron plate. You know, surprise, surprise. So they left it alone, which was great for us. So yeah, it is, it is interesting how kind of one, one account of something can just so capture
01:01:48
Speaker
the, you know, both the public imagination, but also, you know, academic and researchers imaginations and drive
01:01:58
Speaker
research and interest in what gets left alone and what doesn't. And people go to the gas station and buy lottery tickets despite the fact that the chances of winning are, you know, one in a million or one in several million. And if you take a look at the History Channel or National Geographic or Discovery, you know, how many of those shows are the lost treasure, the lost this, the lost that and or the hunt for such and such.
01:02:28
Speaker
I understand how it can captivate the imagination, but I think that there are so many more interesting stories that can be told, especially about shipwrecks.
Misconceptions about Treasure Hunting
01:02:38
Speaker
Shipwrecks are full of so much drama, so much human drama, and so many interesting stories with interesting people. It takes so much courage to leave your home, get on a ship where you can't see land, to go to a place that you don't know, to go build a whole life. That is so much more interesting to me than
01:02:57
Speaker
some gold bars or some necklaces. Underwater archaeology has the potential to answer these really big questions about the beginnings of globalization, trade, language, transitions, all of these really fascinating big questions. And instead, people want to focus on
01:03:18
Speaker
the treasure and so it can be really frustrating when we can really talk about a lot of human experience and knowledge in this capacity and instead we're focused on the stuff so now that I'm bitter or anything. No but that that is incredibly
01:03:35
Speaker
you know, frustrating and, um, you know, an earlier episode, um, actually may have been a trial tales episode. Emily asked us all, uh, several people know what our favorite, favorite object that we ever found was. And, um, you know, people ask me that all the time and they're often very disappointed in my like, Oh, well I found this great rock at this one time. Hey guys, rock. Like, Oh, that's cool. Like piece of pottery. Yay. And they're like, what's an entire pot?
01:04:05
Speaker
No. It's like three centimeters wide, but it's really cool, I swear. You know, and just the misconceptions around what archaeology is and like we're not all finding, you know, the lost city of Troy or, you know, although like we should just do an entire episode where I rant about Schliemann for an hour. I could rant. I can't even tell you how many people have asked me if I'm looking for Atlantis.
01:04:34
Speaker
Oh my god, yeah. You should just say, yes. And then it's like, ooh, really? And you can say, direct them to that Disney movie Atlantis and be like, I'm in this amazing documentary called Atlantis. Yeah, I just kind of look at people and when they ask me, oh, are you looking for treasure? And just give them some snarky comment like, yes, this is the treasure of knowledge or something.
01:05:00
Speaker
And I mean, granted, underwater archaeology is really cool. It's a cool job. It's very romantic. I get that. But I spend 95% of my time sitting at a desk behind a computer doing research or analytics or conservation or, you know, other things, just like every other archaeologist.
01:05:25
Speaker
You know, use for every week you spend in the field you spend six months in the lab and underwater archaeology for every week you spend in the field, you could arguably spend a year in the lab. So, while underwater archaeology is glamorous and we have shipwrecks and these, you know, amazing preserve sites.
01:05:41
Speaker
We also have a responsibility to those which means that we have to do all of the unglamorous jobs to like do GIS work for 35 hours a week or work in a lab with tiny little tools to do your conservation and those kind of things. Yeah, so I think that's probably a good note to end on because we are reaching the end of our
01:06:04
Speaker
hour-long show unless you have one other thing to add though yes yeah yeah final thoughts that's a good closing thought if you would do archaeology what should you do if you want to become an underwater archaeologist or you want to go to an underwater archaeology field school
01:06:21
Speaker
The minimum certification you need to dive is generally open water. I would recommend getting a couple more dives because an open water certification is normally four or five dives so maybe getting one or two more than that. And there is the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology website. It's acuaonline.org and they list underwater archaeology field schools. They have a student newsletter that comes out once a quarter and they have lots of great information about where you can go to be trained to become an underwater archaeologist.
01:06:51
Speaker
and they even have reviews of graduate schools and all sorts of stuff. So you can check that out. Spectacular. Well, Jessica and Emily, thank you so much for joining me tonight. I know I say this just about every week, but I always feel like I learned so much getting to talk to you when we record these. If anyone who's listening wants to learn more about underwater archaeology or has questions about any of the things discussed tonight, you can always reach us on Twitter at womenarchees
01:07:19
Speaker
or at the women in archaeology at gmail.com email account. And again, thank you so much ladies and I'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye.
01:07:39
Speaker
We hope you have enjoyed the show. Please be sure to subscribe and rate our show wherever you listen. We are available on iTunes, Stitcher, and probably whatever your favorite podcasting app is. Remember to like and share. If you have questions or comments, you can post them in the comment section for the show at the Women in Archaeology page on the Archaeology Podcasting Network site, or email them to us at womeninarchaeologypodcast.com. This show is part of the Archaeology Podcasting Network,
01:08:07
Speaker
and is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle. You can reach them at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Music for the show was Retro Future by Kevin MacLeod, available at Encomptep and Royalty Free Music. Thanks for listening!
01:08:27
Speaker
This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and edited by Richie Cruz. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.