Page 75 - Kennemerland VOC ship, 1664 - Published Reports

K. MUCKELROY: HISTORIC WRECK SITES
Figure 1. Map of the British Isles, showing the loca- tions of the 20 sites used in the correlation exercise. The key to the site numbers is given in the classification of wreck sites in Section 2.
certain areas. For a short while, after it had broken open, it appears that the South Edin- burgh Channel wreck did adopt the aspect of such a mound, but this was only a transitory stage produced by special circumstances in the shifting channels of the Thames estuary. How- ever, the appearance of several post-Classical wrecks in the Mediterranean, such as the Russian warship off the south coast of France mentioned by Miss Frost (1962: 83), shows that there is no intrinsic reason why these later and larger vessels should not settle down in this way.
Class 2. Slightly less coherent and complete than the above sites are those on which some broken elements of the ship’s structure have survived, along with a substantial part of the ship’s contents, including items made of all
types of material. The example of the Dart- mouth (5) in the Sound of Mull (Adnams, 1974) has shown that such a site can exist in situations which are, on the face of it, extremely rocky and unpromising. This is a type of site which was not anticipated in the early days of the subject, but it promises to become a very important class for British workers, since sites of Class 1 may not prove to be very common. Another site which I have assigned to this class is that of the Trinidad Valencera(3) in County
Donegal (Martin, 1975).
Class 3. The next type of site is one on which there is a fair quantity of fragile organic material, and thus a wide range of artefacts from the vessel, although there is little or no surviving ship’s structure. A necessary corollary of this situation is that the artefacts have not moved around a great deal since deposition, and that therefore their locations still contain some archaeological significance. An example of this type of site is the Kennemerland site (1) in the Shetland Isles (Price & Muckelroy, 1974), where there is certainly both a wide range of artefact types and significance in their dis- tributions (Muckelroy, 1975). The Colossus (20) in the Scilly Isles appears also t o contain a reasonable range of different artefact types, including a fair amount of organic material. I have also included in this class the site of the Santa Maria de la Rosa (9) in Blasket Sound (Martin, 1975), despite the fact that an area of the ship’s structure was discovered, since the range of other artefacts was so small as to disqualify it from Class 2.
Class 4. The next class comprises those sites on which virtually no organic material has been found, but which have still yielded a wide range of artefacts representing a broad cross-section of the ship’s contents. Nearly half of the sites considered fall into this class, including:
Association, Scilly Isles (Morris, 1969) Curacao (1€9,Shetland Isles
De Liefde ( 2 ) , Shetland Isles (Bax &
Martin, 1974)
El Gran Grifon (6),Fair Isle (Martin, 1975) Evstafii (19), Shetland Isles (Stdnuit, 1976) Girona (8), Northern Ireland (Stdnuit,
1973)
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