Page 86 - Kennemerland VOC ship, 1664 - Published Reports

R. PRICE AND K. MUCKELROY: THEKENNEMERLAND
the family papers of the Earls of Elgin, whose
ancestors, the Earl and Countess of Kincardine,
were granted the rights to the salvage of all
goods from the Kennemerland (‘except what
was intrometted with by the Earl of Morton,
and transferred to the said deceased Earl’) on
22 November 1670, and again on 21 February
1682 (Green, 1895; Dallas, 1774). A tantalis-
ingly brief hint of further activity decades
after the wrecking is given in a document from
the Bruce of Symbister papers in the Scottish
Records Office, dated 31 January 1700; it is a
letter from John Mitchell of Westshore ‘allow- of artefact have therefore been omitted, as
ing and warranting William Hunter of Lunna to go to the island of Skerries and there to win or drag or fish wracked goods as lie upon the sea bottom about the said islands to save and secure the same’. The final report on the Kennemerland excavations will include a full account of the relevant archival material, from English, Scottish, and Dutch sources.
The main part of this interim report is divided into two sections. The first deals with the excavations of 1974 and 1976, and includes a detailed account of the techniques used, in order both to allow the reader to understand the circumstances in which the information presented was gathered, and to assist other
being of wider significance in post-medieval archaeology; a separate interim report on these objects is being prepared. Specifically, the omitted classes are pottery, clay pipes, glass- ware, and leatherwork; for each of these, only a brief summary of the extent of the collections is presented.
Theexcavations, 1974and 1976
a. Strategy
The 1973 season saw the excavation of six sites in that part of the South Mouth which appeared to have attracted most of the artefacts from the ship, i.e. Sites A to F on Fig. 1 (Price & Muckel-
excavators seeking to investigate a similar site. General site location maps, which can be found in the earlier interim reports (Forster & Higgs, 1973: figs 2 & 3; Price & Muckelroy, 1974: figs 1-3) are not repeated here; however, the present Fig. 1 supercedes the previous pub- lished plan of the excavations (Price & Muckel- roy, 1974: fig. 2). The second section contains a detailed illustrated catalogue of finds from the 1973, 1974 and 1976 seasons, concentrat- ing on those which are of primarily nautical interest. Detailed descriptions of certain classes
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