Page 25 - Green - Maritime Archaeology: A Technical Handbook. 2nd ed

4 Maritime Archaeology: A Technical Handbook, Second Edition
Steffy (1994) published a groundbreaking work, Wooden Ship Building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks, in which he discusses how shipwreck sites should be investigated and that “each wreck must be analyzed as accu- rately and as extensively as possible by means of a controlled discipline; we have come to know this discipline as ship reconstruction.” Steffy’s approach was to take the basic ship-related information from archaeological ship- wreck sites and attempt to extrapolate from the evidence a reconstruction of the ship. This is a particularly important and scholarly work and possi- bly one of the most important theoretical contributions to the field in the last decade.
From an archaeological point of view the study of maritime sites and artifacts has opened up new fields of study. In part these have comple- mented existing fields of study, but in many cases the area of study is totally new. The hulls of ancient ships and their contents, apart from one or two examples, have not previously been available for study. The material from shipwrecks is unusual for several reasons including that the circumstances of the loss of a vessel in one instant of time often leaves a large quantity of material, much of which can be recovered or reconstructed. This may be contrasted with objects that survive today in museums and collections, which do so because they were rare or valuable and were therefore to be kept and collected. Thus, if one’s view of the past is based solely on museum collections, there tends to be a bias toward luxury and there is often little of the mundane, day-to-day items that would have been found in the houses of the masses. This view has changed within the last decade as archaeology has opened up fields of study that relate to these issues. The Jorvik Viking Centre in York is a good example of this; a place where everyday life of the Vikings is shown. Another example of this shift in perspective is with the Egyptian excavations. Here the archaeology is probably driven by the fact that there are few remaining Pharaonic tombs to be found, but there is now a considerable emphasis on discovering who the builders of the pyramids were and what the life of the ordinary person was like in Egypt during the time of the Pharaohs.
There is a difference too in the nature of maritime archaeological sites. The material from terrestrial archaeological sites usually represents occu- pation over a period of time, often centuries, and the artifacts that survive do so in a complex pattern demanding great skill on the part of the archae- ologist to understand and interpret. Often terrestrial sites have had a con- tinual history of interference, both human and natural, and the continued occupation of sites make understanding them as a series of events extremely complicated. Underwater sites, on the other hand, particularly shipwreck sites, tend to be single events in time. Shipwreck sites usually contain all the material that was on board the ship at the moment of sinking,