What Does it Mean to “Go Digital”? – By Dr. T. Mills Kelly

Back in the late 1990s – the days of Web 0.5 – I was a pioneer of sorts when it came to thinking about how new media might be changing the way students thought about the past. I got started with research on new media because I had an itch that needed scratching…What I wanted to know was whether or not the work I was putting into my website and into creating web-based assignments for my students was remotely worth it. I decided I needed to do a little research to see what I could learn about how my students used the digital learning materials I was creating for them and whether their use of those materials was changing their thinking at all.

As often happens with “little research projects,” the work I did that year transformed my career in that it opened me up to an entirely new way of thinking about teaching and learning. And because the results of my project found their way into an online journal, which then won an award, which then led to a job at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, I was suddenly an expert of sorts on digital pedagogy.

Integrating Underwater and Terrestrial Archaeology – By Matthew A. Russell

As Jim Delgado reminded us in a recent MUA blog, underwater archaeology has been a separate and distinct sub-discipline of archaeology since George Bass’s first full-scale underwater excavation at Cape Gelidonya in 1960. Unfortunately, many early practitioners of underwater archaeology were not treated as serious scholars by terrestrial colleagues in the mainstream of either classical or anthropological archaeology. From the beginning, underwater archaeologists had to fight the perception that antiquarian-style collecting was the limit to what could be done underwater. This perception was repeatedly challenged through early publications that demonstrated the potential of anthropological archaeology underwater, including Keith Muckelroy’s Maritime Archaeology (1978), and Richard Gould’s edited volume Shipwreck Anthropology (1983), which was based on a School of American Research Advanced Seminar organized by Daniel Lenihan and Larry Murphy in 1981. Early skepticism about the scientific or academic contributions of underwater archaeology may also have been because of the inevitable confusion between treasure hunting and underwater archaeology, a problem that still exists among the public and even among other archaeologists. Despite fifty years of professional underwater archaeological research and publication, a gap still exists between terrestrial and underwater archaeologists.

The Institute of Nautical Archaeology – By Dr. James P. Delgado

Founded in 1973, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology is in its 37^th year of operation in 2010, and we are celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the first scientific archaeological excavation of a shipwreck under water at Cape Gelidonya.  When journalist/adventurer Peter Throckmorton arrived in Bodrum in the spring of 1958 to write about Turkish sponge divers, he learned of many ancient wrecks as he gained the divers’ confidence.  Throckmorton visited many of them, diving on what he later said were up to a hundred wrecks.  He also visited an underwater excavation off Albenga, Italy, where six divers worked on a Roman wreck, supervised by archaeologists who remained on the deck and did not dive.  Important discoveries were being made elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and in the U.S., and pioneering explorers interested in archaeological discovery were diving, but no one had completely excavated a shipwreck under water.

Treasure Hunters, So Few So Loud – United States Perspective – By Dr. Anne Giesecke

The purpose of the Abandoned Shipwreck Act (ASA) was to remove shipwrecks in state waters from the federal admiralty court.  After all, the states had the right to permit excavation of state land for any other purpose, sand, oil etc.  Unfortunately, I underestimated the territorial power grab of the federal courts that started about the same time, the early 1980’s,  that has resulted in them declaring jurisdiction over concepts such as abandoned or whatever as well as global claims for the Titanic, Lusitania and the Bismarck.   The federal court applied their power grab even   more aggressively to business by running companies like AT & T and GM.  So the purpose of the ASA was partially met as states had to fight fewer claims in federal court and could put more energy into establishing underwater parks and programs.  The primary purpose of the ASA, from an historical perspective was educational.

The Seventh “P” – By Dr. Susan Langley

I recently ran across the following quotation regarding profiting from underwater history, archaeology and ocean environments:

“[Profit] A dirty word?  Should there be financial gain from encouraging respect of the ocean and the history it shrouds?  Of course! Even non-profit organizations survive on donations from other people’s earnings and revenues, which are generated by profit.  The Other ‘P’s depend on the support of the profit, as it depends on them.  Without it, Passion dwindles, the Product loses value, Protection & Preservation suffer, and Promotion becomes pointless.  No Profit, end of Dream!”

50 Years Later – By Dr. Filipe Castro

In 2010, less than one year from now, George F. Bass and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology will go back to Cape Gelidonya and take a new look at the Late Bronze Age site that 50 years ago was the first shipwreck to be excavated in its entirety on the seabed, by a diving archaeologist, and using the common standards of land archaeology.  The careful excavation, conservation, study, and publication of its artifact collection led archaeologists to believe that this late 13^th-Century BCE ship was originally Near Eastern, probably Syrian or Canaanite, and pushed the beginning of the Phoenician seafaring tradition several centuries back.  Such can be the importance of a shipwreck excavation.

Squeaky Wheels – By David Ball

The two previous blog postings have included, to a certain extent, a discussion on the issue of treasure hunting versus archaeology. It is unfortunate that so many conversations on marine archaeology often turn to this well-worn argument; however, it remains an important issue and one that will no doubt continue for the foreseeable future. One reason archaeologists are losing the battle of educating the public on the need to protect submerged archaeological resources is because we fail to voice our concerns in large enough numbers to lawmakers and regulators. So I thought I’d move the discussion toward mentioning an initiative currently underway in the United States.

‘Where there’s Muck there’s Brass’: Archaeology and the Real World? – By Dr. Joe Flatman

There is nothing like a recession to get everyone thinking about value– what people value in terms of personal as well as professional ethics, and more cynically about how they themselves are valued, how much their jobs are ‘worth’ both socially and economically. Issues like this are especially important to archaeologists– or at least they should be if we are to genuinely lay claim to Mortimer Wheeler’s maxim that ‘archaeologists are digging up, not things, but people’. Identifying the tangible benefits to society of archaeology is difficult at the best of times but especially so when finances are pinched; to paraphrase from the macroeconomic term, we do not produce either guns or butter, so what is the value of our contribution? How does archaeology ‘work’ in the ‘real world’ of profit and loss?

So, Who Cares About Underwater Cultural Heritage? – By Dr. John Broadwater

Back in the 1970s, when I first became interested in protecting shipwrecks, the picture was pretty bleak. In the United States, there was no national legislation to protect shipwrecks or other submerged archaeological sites. Among the very few states with protective legislation, most imposed few—if any—archaeological requirements, and the bulk of the recovered cultural material was given to the salvors. Frequently, salvors turned to the Admiralty courts where they were usually designated “salvor in possession,” often being given complete control of the site and its contents.