There has been important new work in maritime archaeology in the 10 years that have passed since the publication of the first edition of Archaeology and the Social History of Ships. How have these findings “made a difference” to our knowledge of what happened in the past? And how have they affected the conduct of maritime archaeology? There have been new discoveries, such as the much-publicized location, recording, and recovery of the Confederate Civil War submarine, CSS Hunley. There have also been detailed major reports on shipwrecks reported earlier, such as the Viking vessels at Roskilde Fjord, Denmark, the royal warship Vasa in Stockholm, and – perhaps most important of all – the shipwrecks and boats of Basque origin at Red Bay, Labrador. The cumulative effect of these reports and findings has been to raise the empirical standard of shipwreck archaeology as a credible historical science.

Just as with the first edition, this book does not attempt to be encyclopedic. It is a critical commentary about how empirical, scientifically grounded archaeology affects what we know about our past. Given limitations of space and format, this kind of review is selective. Specific shipwreck studies and other shipwreck-related findings were selected for their relevance to some of the dominant issues of social history. Archaeology is a powerful tool for testing our ideas about what happened in the past, so I chose examples that offered special insights or raised major questions about the characteristics and development of maritime societies.

Given the limitations of sailing large, square-rigged ships of war, the line of battle – columns of heavily armed ships in parallel opposite each other at close range – was the preferred way to bring as many guns to bear at once against an opponent during fleet actions at sea. The movements of these ships were constrained by the wind, because square-rigged ships had limited capabilities in upwind sailing and maneuvering. The masts and rigging of these ships also interfered with the radius of fire by their guns. It was difficult to place guns on the upper deck where they could rotate and fire freely in any direction. Instead, the main gun batteries were arrayed in rows on either side of the ship, where they fired through open gunports. This arrangement, which evidence from shipwrecks like the Mary Rose shows was in use by at least the 16th century, meant that individual guns were restricted in their ability to elevate and traverse. The positioning of one's ship relative to one's opponent was more important in bringing the guns to bear than the aim or accuracy of the gun. Another limitation imposed by this mode of warfare at sea was that the black powder used produced prodigious quantities of smoke that enveloped fighting ships after their first broadside. This often made it difficult for opposing ships to see each other well enough to maneuver and train their guns.

The most serious challenge to shipwreck and underwater archaeology today is counteracting the effects of treasure-hunting. These effects are both direct and indirect. The direct ones have to do with the destruction of submerged archaeological sites, and the indirect ones arise from the confusion created by the appropriation of the techniques of underwater archaeology for profit instead of preservation.

Author Peter Benchley (1989: 74) celebrates the joys of finding and taking objects from shipwrecks in Bermuda as follows:

However romantically phrased, the approach advocated by Benchley and others is entreprenurial, aimed at increasing the sale value of artifacts recovered from shipwrecks whenever possible. Behar (1986) and Wilkinson (1991) warn investors to regard treasure-hunting schemes as high-risk ventures with little likelihood of profit, pointing to a tendency for otherwise rational people to make irrational decisions when it comes to investments of this kind. The best litmus test for distinguishing treasure-hunting from archaeology is to see what happens to the materials after they are recovered.

Underwater archaeology offers a unique perspective on ancient trade. Shipwrecks provide information about trading behavior and relationships at a distance, in contexts that differ sharply from those on land.

Archaeologist Colin Renfrew (1975: 4) noted that trade “…requires organization as well as commodity,” and he went on to develop a comprehensive theory of trade. His theory was based on a model of exchange involving 10 different modes of trade. Each of these postulated different kinds of patterning of material items in the archaeological record as a result of different ways of organizing trade (Renfrew, 1975: 41–44). For maritime archaeology, however, Renfrew's theory is applicable only to ports of trade and other shore-based facilities.

For maritime archaeologists, the principal loci for evidence of ancient trade occur at points between the nodes of exchange in Renfrew's model. The Bronze Age wrecks at Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya and the Roman-era wreck at Madrague de Giens (along with scores of other Roman-era cargo transports) were the remains of vessels wrecked while en route between points and not necessarily near a point of departure or destination. Renfrew admitted that (1975: 45) “Maritime trade virtually excludes certain modes, such as mode 4 [down-the-line] and it is a truism that rivers or seas may be regarded either as barriers or as easy channels of communication according to the transport available.”

Later, Renfrew proposed distance-decay relationships between items of trade and the distances of those items from their source.

In contrast to the cargoes of earlier times, which consisted largely of sumptuary and priority goods, mid-19th-century maritime trade increasingly involved bulk cargoes of commodities, with steam propulsion and iron construction becoming more important as alternative technologies to sail propulsion and wood construction. The mid-to-late-19th century was an important period of transition, during which expanding economies of scale and these new technologies evolved together in a complex manner within the social context of the Western mercantile system. Underwater archaeology is proving a potent and effective tool for understanding this transition. Archaeologists studying this period cannot always expect to find preserved cargoes, even with ships known to have been used as freighters or transports. With cargoless wrecks in which all or part of the cargo (often perishable) may have been lost after the ship sank, however, analysis of the ship's structure can be as informative about the conduct of trade as it is about ship technology. Two areas discussed earlier as notorious ship traps, the Dry Tortugas and Bermuda Islands, have provided exceptional opportunities for studying maritime commerce of this period.

The Killean

Underwater surveys and documentation sponsored by the NPS in the Dry Tortugas in Florida have enabled maritime archaeologists to identify two basic categories of mid-19th-century shipwrecks there: construction wrecks, the remains of ships that were engaged in bringing building materials to Fort Jefferson between the 1840s and late 1860s, and en-route wrecks, the remains of vessels transporting cargoes through the Straits of Florida.

It has been suggested that if a sailor from the days of the Spanish Armada in 1588 could have been transported forward through time to the deck of a sailing ship in the mid- to late-19th century, about 300 years later, he would have been familiar with the sails, rigging, and general character of the ship and could have proceeded about his duties without delay or specialized training. The various European cultural traditions that emerged over this 300- to 400-year period eventually settled on a class of ship, the galleon, that was to dominate overseas colonization, trade, and war. The galleon was the product of processes of cultural selection during the course of numerous voyages of exploration, fishing, whaling, and initial colonization that encompassed the New World, Africa, and Asia (with a few unplanned excursions to Australia). Events in Europe also had a direct bearing on the course of overseas empire, especially in the head-to-head competition between Spanish and English seafarers, and underwater archaeology has profoundly influenced our understanding of the nature of this competition. The final phase of the European transition from medieval to postmedieval maritime culture from the 14th to the mid-16th century, received a strong impetus from the societies of the Iberian Peninsula – the Spanish, Portuguese, and the Basques – along with influences from the Genoese and the Venetians.

Ships of all times and places operate within an infrastructure of harbors, canals, shipyards, coastal defences, ports, docks, and specialized cargo handling and processing facilities, all of which are as important as the ships themselves. The exploration and recording of these kinds of structures have been an important part of underwater archaeology for almost a century. French engineer Gaston Jondet pioneered the archaeological study of submerged port facilities at Pharos, near Alexandria, in the early 1900s, and Andre Poidebard, a French Jesuit priest and scholar, carried out similar research at Tyre in 1934–1936. Poidebard's studies influenced later research and introduced the concept of the protoharbor, applying it specifically to the pre-Roman ports of the Levantine coast (Frost, 1972b: 97). The coastline of the eastern Mediterranean, including that of modern Syria and Israel, lacks good natural harbors and is exposed to the full force of Mediterranean winds and waves. This stretch of coastline was close to important centers of land commerce in the ancient world, so there were powerful economic incentives for the development of trading ports along this coast from the Bronze Age on.

The idea of the protoharbor was that the earliest ports along this coast would not have been built up in their entirety but instead would have depended on the presence of natural reefs, rock outcrops, and offshore islands that could be modified by flattening and shaping to provide good anchorages by extensive rock cutting.

As a historical science, shipwreck archaeology requires some basic understanding of the physical relationships between ship design and construction and the medium in which voyaging occurs. It also requires an organized approach to the physical context of the wreck – both the factors leading to the loss of the vessel and the factors that have affected the condition and distribution of wreck materials at the site. Many such relationships operate according to uniformitarian principles – that is, they can be assumed to have operated in the past in the same manner, though not necessarily at the same rate, as they do today.

Any ship other than a submersible operates simultaneously and continuously in two media, the sea and air, while avoiding contact with a third, land, except under specific conditions like docking or beaching. The combination of sea and air environments, fluid and ever changing, dominates all maritime activities. Each of these media independently affects the movements of a ship at sea. A vessel approaching a dock on a windy day, for example, with a current moving in one direction and a wind from another at different velocities is affected differently above and below water by each. Docking under such conditions requires a high order of skill and experience, and the ship's ability to maneuver and change speed is critical.

Sea and air environments also interact in complex ways.

Because the remains of early watercraft are often found in saturated soils and peat bogs, the archaeological record tends toward overrepresentation of log and wood-plank boats. These are better preserved than watercraft made of skins, reeds, or other, more perishable materials (McGrail, 1981: 6). Sometimes this bias can be overcome to a degree by use of documentary and iconographic information, although such representations often lack detail and may be inaccurate. The biggest problem with the archaeology of small watercraft has been the tendency to resort to conjectural history to overcome the limitations and gaps imposed by the archaeological record. There are serious questions about the use of ethnographic analogies in the attempt to understand ancient boatbuilding and use (McGrail, 1998: 3). Their value to archaeology was succinctly summarized by Muckelroy (1978: 236) as providing a wider range of possibilities for assessing how particular boat technologies may have been used than experimental reconstructions or computer-generated simulations. The archaeology of boats and early ships has come a long way, however, since Muckelroy's time, and today archaeological evidence can support more empirically grounded analysis and interpretations.

Ephemeral Watercraft

The earliest direct archaeological evidence for small boats is a birchwood paddle preserved in peat and mud deposits at the site of Star Carr, a roughly 8,000-year-old Mesolithic campsite in northeastern England (Clark, 1954: 23; Fig. 77, Plate 21).

Nearly all archaeological recording techniques represent trade-offs between the desire for precision and the practical limitations imposed by funding, time, logistics, and personnel. Underwater archaeology has available to it a wide array of tools, ranging from the simple trowel to sophisticated remote-sensing devices like the magnetometer, side-scan sonar, and subbottom profiler, none of which were ever originally intended or designed specifically for archaeological use. As we characterize the current state of the art in underwater archaeology, it is important to keep in mind the minimalist principle of using the simplest tool or technique available for the task required. This does not mean taking shortcuts with controls needed to obtain convincing results, but it does warn against relying on complex and often untried or experimental technologies when simpler or more reliable techniques are available to accomplish the same task. The reason for such caution is the destructiveness of archaeological excavation. Careless or inadequately controlled excavation will result in the permanent disruption of archaeological associations and the consequent loss of essential information about the site and how it formed. The choice of archaeological techniques and controls employed at a particular site where excavation is deemed necessary is perhaps the most critical decision the archaeologist faces.

An example of what can happen in the absence of archaeological techniques and controls is the recovery of the USS Cairo, a Federal ironclad river gunboat that sank in 1862 near Vicksburg, Mississippi, after falling victim to a Confederate explosive mine during the Civil War.