Dive in to explore the fascinating world of underwater cultural heritage

Our 2021 Under The Water Webinar Series featured monthly talks and discussions on underwater heritage topics from the development of the discipline, to submerged cave archaeology to prehistoric submerged landscape archaeology.

Thanks to funding support from the Honor Frost Foundation the webinar series was free to join.

----------

Webinar No.12: 15th December 2021 at 19:00 GMT

Race against time: The Modern Shipwreck Project, Lebanon

Speakers: Dr Lucy Semaan and Sergio El Kesrouwani, Honor Frost Foundation Lebanon

From the winter of 2020 onwards, the Honor Frost Foundation’s Lebanon team has been surveying the near-shore waters of Lebanon in order to inventory, record, and document submerged metal wrecks dating from the late modern period to present times. This paper puts forth the methodology and approach adopted by HFF-Lebanon that entails performing desk-based research coupled with ground-truthing dives on wreck sites. The work is an integral part of the HFF Modern Shipwreck Database Project in Lebanon with a custom-built QGIS plug-in database where alphanumeric, vector, and raster data is being stored and progressively populated and updated.

The wrecks mostly consist of 20th century cargo ships and a few military vessels that date back to the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), as well as WWI and WWII. Although many of these ships are not strictly considered as archaeology according to the national legislation, they certainly hold historic and cultural value. Due to the lack of monitoring and implementation of protective measures, the shipwrecks are prone to looting and damaging by sport divers and fishing activity. The Project’s goal is to mitigate these threats, among other initiatives, by documenting wrecks through photogrammetry to help preserve these sites and share them with the public, so that they can be appreciated and valued, and that the past is not forgotten.

----------

Webinar No.11: 24th November 2021 at 19:00 GMT

Aviation Heritage Underwater – Archaeological Site Formation Processes and Other Considerations

Speaker: Hunter W. Whitehead, Principal Marine Archaeologist at Coastal Environments, Inc, USA

The study of sunken historic aircraft has become a prominent sub-discipline of underwater archaeology over the past several decades. Internationally, archaeologists and heritage managers have approached sunken historic aircraft with distinctive evaluation and preservation practices. Some have expanded upon and altered Keith Muckelroy’s shipwreck site formation processes model to better fit the unique depositional phases of sunken aircraft.

This presentation will draw from Muckelroy’s model and apply observations from the recent investigations of a Bell P-39Q Airacobra in Lake Huron, Michigan and the ongoing survey of submerged naval aircraft off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Initial site interpretations will be discussed, along with a comparison of natural and cultural factors affecting each site.

----------

Webinar No.10: 26th October 2021 at 19:00 BST

Experimental Archaeology – A 15 year journey to show how the Phoenicians could have reached the Americas.

Speaker: Philip Beale, FRGS

Sailor/Adventure/Author Philip Beale explains how he commissioned the building of a replica Phoenician ship on the ancient Phoenician island of Arwad in Syria in 2007. The vessel was designed from information derived from the Jules Verne 7 wreck, found near Marseille, France, in the 1990’s. Then in 2019-20 he sailed the “Phoenicia” from Carthage, Tunisia across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, illustrating the possibility of such voyages in the ancient period.

----------

Webinar No.9: 22nd September 2021 at 19:00 BST

Highways to the Interior – Riverine Cultural Landscapes: Investigating the archaeology and social history of Australia’s River Systems

Speaker Dr Brad Duncan, Senior Maritime Archaeologist, Specialist Services Team, Heritage NSW

Prior to the introduction of major road networks across Australia, rivers acted as highways to the interior, linking vast expanses of prime agricultural land, natural resources and industries with local, national and international markets. Regardless of their size, navigable river systems also facilitated social and cultural contact between townships, not only by bringing valuable produce into and out of often remote areas, but also by acting as a conduit to link disparate communities. River systems therefore represent an opportunity to study interactive riverine cultural landscapes that often transcended state borders, linking isolated archaeological sites and oral and documentary histories, to provide a more comprehensive view of life on Australia’s interior waterways.

This presentation will highlight ongoing research in a number of river systems, with a particular focus on the Murray River and NSW northern rivers systems, to demonstrate the diversity of activities, industries, vessels and archaeological sites associated with Australian interior waterways.

----------

Webinar No.8: 31st August 2021 at 19:00 BST

The Punic Ship of Marsala - Fifty Years of Discovery

Speakers: Dr Claire Calcagno and Lauren Tidbury, Honor Frost Foundation

"Between two piles of ballast-stones, a large timber (such as I had never seen before) emerged from the sand like the head of a primeval animal crowned with weed: the presence of a wreck was evident." (Honor Frost, 1981). 

Half a century ago a unique ancient shipwreck was discovered off the western coast of Sicily by an underwater survey team directed by Honor Frost. The distinctive ship hull was sleek, built for speed, and bore Punic shipwrights’ marks. It carried little cargo other than ballast stones, and was dated through epigraphic analysis and C-14 dating to the mid-third century BC. Discussions regarding the vessel’s precise function have animated specialists over the decades. Frost hypothesised that it was a military long-ship that came to grief following the sea battle between the Romans and Carthaginians that ended the First Punic War on March 10, 241 BC. The Punic Ship, currently on display in Marsala at the Museo archeologico Lilybaeum Baglio Anselmi is recognized as a milepost in the history of archaeology. 

Since its discovery the site has continued to inspire new research. Recently the hull was digitally recorded, a key to assessing its current condition and informing future conservation strategies. This was followed by the creation of a virtual exhibition and a virtual dive of the shipwreck site as it may have looked in the 1970s, offering viewers a chance to explore the vessel in greater detail. On another front, Frost’s unfinished memoir recounting her Sicilian experiences, which she wrote in the 1980s, was only discovered in her archive shortly after her death. Titled The Second Life of a Phoenix. Portrait of a Punic Ship Resurrected in a Sicilian Town, her book is being prepared for publication in English and Italian by Claire Calcagno and Elena Flavia Castagnino Berlinghieri. 

In this webinar we will present images from the archive and tell the story of the Marsala Punic Ship, as well as the more recent work being undertaken to mark the 50th anniversary of the ship’s discovery. 

----------

Webinar No.7: 28th July 2021 at 19:00 BST

Archaeology of high-altitude lacustrine socio-ecosystems in the central Andes

Speaker: Dr Christophe Delaere, Université libre de Bruxelles

The Andes Cordillera stretches along thousands of kilometers in western South America, covering vast portions of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. It is characterized in particular (i) by a diversity of ecosystems spreading over several ecological levels that can reach almost 7,000 meters above sea level and (ii) by the presence of hundreds of lagunas and lakes ranging from micro to macro lake ecosystems. Lacustrine drainage basins are part of the most dynamic landscapes of the Andean Cordillera because the imbalance in the hydrological scale produces variation in lake levels that can cause flooding or droughts over short and periods. For archaeology, periodic changes represent a research opportunity, as they have frequently contributed to the preservation of paleo-landscapes. A part of the Andes Cordillera’s lake territories today submerged, including ancient shores, can be studied through techniques and methods of inland water archaeology. In this lecture, I propose to present the results of the excavation operations carried out from 2012 to 2018 in the "rain gauge of the Andes": Lake Titicaca.

SPEAKER BIO : Christophe Delaere is an archaeologist specialising in inland water archaeology and Andean prehistory. He has been leading the Lake Titicaca underwater research project since 2012. He obtained his PhD in History, Art History and Archaeology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology . He is currently a research associate at the Centre de Recherches en Archéologie et Patrimoine, Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

----------

Webinar No.6: 29th June 2021 at 19:00 BST

Ayn Soukhna, an intermittent harbour in the Red Sea pharaonic network

Speaker: Dr Claire Somaglino, Assistant Professor, Sorbonne University

Ayn Soukhna, a site excavated since 2001 by a French-Egyptian mission, is located some 50 km south of Suez. It is one of the oldest maritime harbours known in Egypt and was a key feature of the Egyptian network in the Red Sea during Pharaonic times. The site was regularly occupied since its foundation in ca. 2470 BC, during the expeditions that the Egyptian monarchy sponsored to the South-Sinai mining area, to retrieve turquoise and copper ore, or more occasionally to the country of Punt, at the south end of the Red Sea. The excavation of a storage area where, among other things, remains of charred boats were retrieved, as well as the discovery of the living quarters of the crews, numerous copper workshops and a few harbour facilities, gives a detailed account of the organisation and daily life of these sea-bound expeditions.

----------

Webinar No.5: 26th May 2021 at 19:00 BST

Pavlopetri – recording a submerged Bronze Age town

Speaker: Dr Jon Henderson, Chancellor's Fellow in Global Challenges, University of Edinburgh

Pavlopetri, off the coast of Laconia, Greece, is often referred to as the oldest submerged town in the world with remains dating from at least 3,500 BC through to the end of the Mycenaean period c.1,100 BC. Underwater research over the past decade has traced structures over 8 hectares of the seabed consisting of intact domestic buildings, larger public constructions, courtyards, streets, funerary structures, graves and rock-cut tombs. As the current project nears completion, this lecture will review the remains recorded underwater, how they came to be submerged and the nature of occupation at the site during the Aegean Bronze Age.

----------

Webinar No.4: 28th April 2021

Early human archaeology at Happisburgh: submerged landscapes and the mine of antediluvian remains

Speaker: Dr Rachel Bynoe, University of Southampton

We were also joined by two discussants - Dr Helen Farr from the University of Southampton and Dr Luc Amkreutz, curator of Prehistory at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities. 

Happisburgh, on the north Norfolk coast, is home to more than just a great pub, it’s also the location of the earliest evidence for human occupation in northern Europe. This includes in situ archaeology on the banks of a large, slow moving river, as well as the footprints of a group of hominins that inhabited these environments around 800,000 years ago. At the time of this occupation the landscapes inhabited by these hominins were drastically different to those we are familiar with today – they extended across the North Sea; Britain was a peninsula of Europe. Despite over a hundred years of awareness of these submerged landscapes, the ways we locate and work with them are still very much developing. This talk will introduce you to the evidence washing up onto the beaches at Happisburgh, the ways in which we’ve been using this evidence to target Palaeolithic deposits underwater and some of our future (post-Covid!) plans.

----------

--------

Webinar No.3: 24th March 2021 at 19:00 GMT

Outside the comfort zone - detecting the subtle in side scan data

Speaker: Professor Timmy Gambin, University of Malta

We were also joined by three discussants - Martin Klein (the father of side-scan sonar), George Papatheodorou from the University of Patras and Megan Metcalfe from Wessex Archaeology.

Ongoing intensive remote sensing surveys of the seabed conducted by the Department of Classics and Archaeology (University of Malta), continue to expand our knowledge on the underwater cultural heritage of the Maltese Islands. The primary objective of these surveys is to map Malta’s underwater cultural assets so as these may be protected and managed according to local laws and international conventions. These surveys are also providing glimpses of the islands’ maritime past - especially that related to the two world wars. Submerged remains of these conflicts are not just abundant but also relatively easy to recognise and distinguish from the surrounding seabed. Chronologically, this talk covers diverse periods and focuses on sites that are more difficult to detect but no less important to the history of the Maltese Islands. This presentation uses a number of highly interesting shipwrecks from Malta’s past which, in turn provide a novel perspective for the study of Malta's connectivity.

----------

--------

Webinar No.2: 24th February 2021 at 20:00 GMT

Exploring the Flooded Caves of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula

Speaker: Sam Meacham, El Centro Investigador del Sistema Acuífero de Quintana Roo A.C. (CINDAQ)

Sam Meacham is the Director of El Centro Investigador del Sistema Acuífero in Quintana Roo, México (www.cindaq.org).  An experienced cave diver, he remains committed to understanding the complex dynamics of the Yucatán Peninsula's karst aquifer, as well as the people affected by it. He has extensive experience leading cave diving expeditions in the region, the most significant of which is the ongoing exploration of Sistema Ox Bel Ha and the adjacent Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve. Sam earned a Master’s Degree in Science in Natural Resources in 2012 from the University of New Hampshire. He has been a Fellow of the Explorers Club of New York since 2000, was a 2009 NASA Space Grant Fellow, and has earned the Award in Maritime Archaeology from the Nautical Archaeology Society. Sam has appeared in documentary films for CNN International, The Discovery Channel, PBS, NHK, The National Geographic Society, and the BBC’s Natural History Unit, including the critically acclaimed “Planet Earth” series.

In the discussion after Sam's talk we were joined by Phil Short, Dr Peter Campbell and Dr Dominique Rissolo to talk about submerged cave archaeology.

----------

--------

Webinar No.1: 20th January 2021 at 16:00 GMT

Taking to the Water – The Development of Underwater Archaeology in the Mediterranean

Panellists: Dr Anna Demetriou, University of Cyprus Maritime Archaeology Research Laboratory (MARE Lab); Dr Lucy Semaan, Honor Frost Foundations’ maritime archaeologist in Lebanon and Ziad Morsy, Egyptian Maritime Archaeologist, PhD Candidate, University of Southampton.

Chaired by Dr Peter Campbell, Cranfield University, UK

-------

----------

The Under The Water Webinar Series is supported by the Honor Frost Foundation