To the map room, Indy!

archaeologicalnews:

The outline of a foot on the Gokstad Ship gives us an inkling of what it might have been like for Vikings to cross the ocean.

He’s crowded into a sleek sailing ship with 65 other men. Scarcely room to move. It’s been days since anybody has seen land − longer since anyone bathed. The old-timers’ repeated tales of bygone raids and voyages are beginning to wear thin. 

His place is behind an oar, but there is no need to row continuously on the North Sea. With wind in the sail, the boat surges towards England, where riches await.

But what is there to do while waiting to reach a foreign coast?

Maybe it was a teenager engaged in a Viking version of tagging a school desk. In any case, someone took out his knife, bent down and traced the outline of his foot on the deck of the Gokstad Ship. Read more.

The Archaeologist.: Lost city of Heracleion

anthropologyatmassey:

An ancient Egyptian city that was submerged beneath the sea more than than 1,200 years ago is being excavated and for the first time we are getting a glimpse into what life was like in the legendary port of Thonis-Heracleion (digital reconstruction shown above).

archaeologicalnews:

She was first raised from her underwater resting place more than 30 years ago and has been prized as an archaeological gem, but it appears the she still has some secrets to surrender.

Scientists studying Henry VIII’s naval flagship, which sank 468 years ago off the south coast of England in a battle with the French, are making new discoveries about the vessel that will change our understanding of history.

New finds will be among 19,000 artefacts going on show in a new £23 million museum, built around the skeleton of the vessel, due to open later this year.

Archaeologists have found the remains of a dog that lived on board, and longbows found on board have revealed a great deal about archery at the time. Read more.

archaeologicalnews:

A mysterious Viking sundial found in Greenland may have helped the ancient mariners sail at the same north-south latitude across the Atlantic, new research suggests.

The study, detailed Tuesday (April 9) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A Mathematical and Physical Sciences, suggests that the raiding Norsemen might have been even more impressive sailors than previously thought.

“It is widely accepted that Norse people were excellent mariners. Now it seems they used much more sophisticated navigational instruments than we thought before,” said study co-author Balázs Bernáth, a researcher at Eötvös University in Hungary. Read more.

archaeologicalnews:

Analysis of a bronze battering ram from a 2000 year-old warship sheds light on how such an object would have been made in ancient times.

Known as the Belgammel Ram, the 20kg artefact was discovered by a group of British divers off the coast of Libya near Tobruk in 1964. The ram is from a small Greek or Roman warship – a “tesseraria”. These ships were equipped with massive bronze rams on the bow at the waterline and were used for ramming the side timbers of enemy ships. At 65cm long, the Belgammel Ram is smaller in size and would have been sited on the upper level on the bow. This second ram is known as a proembolion, which strengthened the bow and also served to break the oars of an enemy ship.

Leading marine archaeologist, Dr Nic Flemming a visiting fellow of the National Oceanography Centre, co-ordinated a team of specialists from five institutes to analyse the artefact before it was returned to the National Museum in Tripoli in May 2010. Their results have been published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Read more.

archaeologicalnews:

Two shipwrecks believed to be 17th-century Danish warships have emerged along the Stockholm waterfront due to unusually low water levels.

“I was stunned by how big it was,” marine archaeologist Jim Hansson told The Local of the find.

Hansson was out for a stroll along Kastellholmen island with his girlfriend on Sunday, taking in some rare springtime sun, when he noticed a pattern of wooden stumps penetrating the surface.

“If it had only been one or two beams sticking up, I may not have noticed it,” he said.

“But I saw immediately that it was a shipwreck. You could clearly see the bow and the stern.” Read more.

caraobrien:

Philip Short and Alexandros Sotiriou raise an intact amphora – an ancient container – from the wreck. It dates from the first century BC and matches those salvaged by Jacques Cousteau in the 1970s.

Photograph: Alexandros Sotiriou/Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities /WHOI

Return to Antikythera: what divers discovered in the deep

(via ipomoeaj)

canadianarchaeology:

It’s the oldest shipwreck ever found in Canada and one of the most important in the world: a 16th-century Basque whaling galleon that lies at the bottom of Labrador’s Red Bay, a sunken relic from the Age of Discovery that symbolizes the early spread of European civilization — and commerce — to the New World

Now, the 450-year-old San Juan, a jumble of thick beams and broken barrels lying in shallow waters off the site of a 1560s-era whaling station in the Strait of Belle Isle, is to be resurrected by a team of Spanish maritime heritage experts planning to construct a full-scale, seaworthy replica of the original 16-metre, three-masted vessel.

(more)

archaeologicalnews:

The mysteries behind Henry VIII’s warship the Mary Rose could lead to a better understanding of how British people lived over 500 years ago, researchers hope.

For the past 18 months the Mary Rose Trust has been working with sports scientists from the College of Engineering at Swansea University to discover more about the lives of medieval archers on board.

When the ship, which sank in 1545, was raised from the Solent in 1982 many thousands of medieval artefacts along with 92 fairly complete skeletons and 100 or so other human remains were recovered.

Nick Owen, a sport and exercise biomechanist at Swansea now hopes scientists across the world can help draw a “fuller picture” of those on board. Read more.

archaeologicalnews:

Known as Shipwreck Alley, Thunder Bay in northwest Lake Huron presents a forbidding scene for boaters and captains but a wonder for divers and marine archaeologists. Its chilly bottom is dotted with dozens of wrecks, from 19th-century schooners to passenger-carrying steamboats to steel-moving freighters that have fallen prey to the bay’s unpredictable weather and dangerous shoals.

More than 50 of these historic hulks are protected by the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which was created in 2000 and covers 448 square miles (1,160 square kilometers) off the northeast coast of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Though most are in relatively good shape, thanks to the wreck-friendly freshwater environment of Lake Huron, a new report released by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) finds the sunken ships might be threatened by a tiny menace: invasive mussels. Read more.

archaeologicalnews:

A woman foraging for seaweed on a beach in Pembrokeshire made a more interesting discovery - mines, believed to be from World War I.

Julia Horton-Powdrill was walking along Caerfai beach near St Davids when she noticed a mine during low tide.

She then discovered two more submerged in watery sand.

Mrs Horton-Powdrill has sent pictures of the mines to the Dyfed Archaeological Trust who have sent them to war historians for analysis.

She had gone to the beach on Wednesday to collect seaweed but said the sea was too rough.

“When I turned around and headed back up the beach I saw this very large iron object half submerged in the water,” she said.

“At first I thought it was some sort of Roman pottery as it was quite rusty. Then my second thought was it must be a mine. Read more.

Archaeology Changes history again...

curious-cuneiform:

For nearly 150 years, the story of the Hunley’s attack on the USS Housatonic has been Civil War legend.

And it has been wrong.

Scientists have discovered a piece of the Confederate submarine’s torpedo still attached to its spar, debunking eyewitness accounts that the Hunley was nearly 100 feet away from the explosion that sent a Union blockade ship to the bottom of the sea off Charleston in 1864.

archaeologicalnews:

Marine archaeologists working on a wreck off the coast of Sicily have discovered five large cannon from a British ship, believed to have sunk in a major battle with Spanish galleons.

The team searching waters near the city of Syracuse said the “exceptional” find dates back to the Battle of Cape Passaro in the early 1700s.

Pictures taken by divers show the cannon were barely covered by sand.

The discovery has helped pinpoint the exact location of the famous battle.

The cannon have now been brought to the surface - after 300 years in the deep sea - and cleaned.

According to the archaeologists, they are in such fine condition that - in some places - the barrels still gleam in the light. Read more.

history-and-shit:

New 3-D images (bottom picture) released today by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show the Civil War-era gunboat U.S.S Hatteras (top) in exquisite detail.

Severe storms, such as 2008’s Hurricane Ike, have moved sand off of the shipwreck that sank during a battle exactly 150 years ago, on January 11, 1863.

Resting in 57 feet (17 meters) of water, the shifting sands enabled archaeologists to go in with high-resolution sonars and map newly uncovered parts of the wreck.

The resolution is so good, “it’s almost photographic,” said archaeologist James Delgado, director of maritime heritage for NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. Delgado and his collaborators have also produced fly-through animations of the historic site and war grave.

“You literally are giving people virtual access to the incredible museum that sits at the bottom of the sea,” he said.

llustration courtesy Becker Collection, Boston College; sonar image courtesy Teledyne BlueView and James Glaeser, Northwest Hydro

Source:

archaeologicalnews:

Marine archaeologists report they have uncovered new secrets of an ancient Roman shipwreck famed for yielding an amazingly sophisticated astronomical calculator. An international survey team says the ship is twice as long as originally thought and contains many more calcified objects amid the ship’s lost cargo that hint at new discoveries.

At the Archaeological Institute of America meeting Friday in Seattle, marine archaeologist Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institute, will report on the first survey of Greece’s famed Antikythera island shipwreck since 1976. The ancient Roman shipwreck was lost off the Greek coast around 67 BC,filled with statues and the famed astronomical clock.

“The ship was huge for ancient times,” Foley says. “Divers a century ago just couldn’t conduct this kind of survey but we were surprised when we realized how big it was.” Read more.