Shipwreck Archaeology

Course Description

Shipwreck Archaeology is an introductory course in Underwater Archaeology with an emphasis on American Maritime History and New World Archaeology as they relate to Pensacola's maritime heritage. The catalog states that the format centres on assigned readings and classroom meetings with lectures, discussions, educational slides and videos, and workshops, with an attempt made to incorporate field elements.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix. UWF publishes this at 3 semester hours.

This course is taught where the material is, and that is not incidental. Pensacola Bay holds the remains of the 1559 Tristán de Luna expedition — the earliest multi-year European colonial settlement attempt in the continental United States, wrecked by a hurricane weeks after arrival — and the University of West Florida has excavated both the shipwrecks and the terrestrial settlement site. Few undergraduate courses in underwater archaeology anywhere sit on top of an assemblage of that significance, and the local emphasis is a genuine advantage rather than a parochial one.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's course catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. There is therefore no institution-stated figure to quote, and every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived.

The figure shown applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, corroborated within this prefix by the live ANT2000 (Introduction to Anthropology) at 3 credits and 45 hours. Confirm the actual meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe underwater archaeology and how it differs from terrestrial practice.
• Describe the history and development of the sub-discipline.
• Describe site formation processes in submerged environments.
• Describe wrecking processes and how a ship becomes a site.
• Describe preservation conditions underwater and what survives.
• Explain why waterlogged organic material survives and what that means for evidence.
• Describe survey and detection methods for submerged sites.
• Describe remote sensing, including magnetometry and sonar.
• Describe excavation techniques used underwater.
• Describe recording and documentation under water.
• Describe the special conservation requirements of waterlogged material.
• Describe American maritime history and its major phases.
• Describe European colonial expansion in the New World and its maritime basis.
• Describe ship construction and how vessels are identified archaeologically.
• Describe cargo, ballast, and assemblage analysis.
• Describe Pensacola's maritime heritage and its archaeological record.
• Describe the Luna expedition and its archaeological significance.
• Describe the legal framework governing submerged cultural resources.
• Describe Florida's ownership of resources on state submerged land.
• Describe treasure hunting and commercial salvage and their consequences.
• Describe the ethical position of the discipline on commercialisation.
• Describe public interpretation of submerged sites and underwater preserves.
• Evaluate claims made about shipwreck sites critically.
• Describe the training and certification required to work underwater.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe maritime cultural landscape approaches.
• Describe naval and warship archaeology.
• Describe the archaeology of the transatlantic slave trade.
• Describe submerged prehistoric landscapes.
• Describe in-situ preservation and monitoring of wreck sites.
• Describe scientific diving certification pathways.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Underwater versus terrestrial archaeology
• History of the sub-discipline
• Submerged site formation
• Wrecking processes
• Underwater preservation conditions
• Waterlogged organic survival
• Survey and detection
• Remote sensing, magnetometry, sonar
• Underwater excavation technique
• Underwater recording
• Conservation of waterlogged material
• American maritime history
• Colonial expansion and maritime capacity
• Ship construction and identification
• Cargo, ballast, and assemblage
• Pensacola's maritime heritage
• The Luna expedition
• Law governing submerged resources
• Florida submerged land ownership
• Treasure hunting and salvage
• Ethics of commercialisation
• Public interpretation and preserves
• Evaluating shipwreck claims
• Diving training and certification

Optional Topics

• Maritime cultural landscapes
• Naval and warship archaeology
• Archaeology of the slave trade
• Submerged prehistoric landscapes
• In-situ preservation and monitoring
• Scientific diving certification

Resources & Tools

• Society for American Archaeology (saa.org) — free Principles of Archaeological Ethics; read them in your first archaeology course, not your last. Student membership is inexpensive.
• Register of Professional Archaeologists (rpanet.org) — free; the eligibility criteria tell you exactly what a professional archaeologist is expected to have done, including a field school.
• Florida Division of Historical Resources (dos.fl.gov/historical) — free; Chapter 267, the permitting process, and the Florida Master Site File.
• National Park Service preservation briefs and the Section 106 guidance (nps.gov, achp.gov) — free, and this is the process most professional archaeologists work inside every day.
• Florida Public Archaeology Network (fpan.us) — free public programmes and volunteer opportunities across the state; an unusually good route to real experience for a Florida student.
• Florida Anthropological Society and its journal — regional research, and a genuine route into the state's archaeological community.
• Get to a field school. It is the entry requirement for professional work, it is what employers and graduate programmes look for first, and nothing substitutes for it.
• Florida's Underwater Archaeological Preserves (museumsinthesea.com) — free; Florida maintains a network of interpreted shipwreck sites open to divers, which is an unusual public resource and directly relevant here.
• UWF's own archaeology programme and its Luna project publications — the site is local, the reports are accessible, and reading the excavation reports of a site you can visit is a rare opportunity.
• Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology (acuaonline.org) — the professional body for this sub-discipline, and its position statements on commercial salvage.
• American Academy of Underwater Sciences (aaus.org) — the standards scientific diving operates under; read them before assuming a recreational certification qualifies you to work.

Career Pathways

• Anthropologists and archaeologists — SOC 19-3091.
• ⚠ Cultural resource management is where the jobs are. The great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance archaeology for consulting firms, agencies, and tribes — driven by Section 106 and state equivalents rather than by research funding. Plan for that rather than for academia.
• Field technician ("shovelbum") — the entry-level role; project-based, travelling, and the standard first job after a field school.
• Crew chief, project archaeologist, and principal investigator — the CRM progression, with a graduate degree generally needed above field technician.
• State and federal agencies — State Historic Preservation Offices, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
• Tribal historic preservation offices — a growing and important sector.
• Museums, collections management, and curation — SOC 25-4012 and 25-4013.
• Historic preservation planning at local and state government level.
• Postsecondary teaching and research — SOC 25-1061; requires a doctorate and is highly competitive.
• ⚠ Be realistic about the entry conditions. Field technician work is seasonal, project-based, frequently far from home, and modestly paid; benefits are inconsistent. Many people do it for a few years and then either move up, move into agency or museum work, or leave. Knowing that in advance is better than discovering it.
• A graduate degree is effectively required to advance beyond field technician in this field — plan the pathway early.
• Underwater and maritime archaeology — a small, competitive speciality; ⚠ it requires scientific diving qualification in addition to archaeological training, and the diving is the easier half to obtain.
• State submerged lands programmes and underwater preserve management.
• Maritime museums and interpretation.
• Marine survey and remote sensing in the offshore and coastal engineering sector, where archaeological clearance is a permitting requirement.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Treasure hunting is not archaeology, and the distinction is the point of the course

• Commercial salvage recovers objects; archaeology recovers information. The two are not different degrees of the same activity — they are incompatible, because selling the assemblage destroys the collection's research value and the context that gave the objects meaning.
• ⚠⚠ The professional societies hold that commercial exploitation of the archaeological record is unethical, and that position is not a matter of taste. A dispersed collection cannot be re-studied, which means the site's information is gone even though the objects survive.
• The economics drive the destruction. Salvage operations are funded by the expectation of sale, which selects for sites with saleable cargo and for recovery methods fast enough to be profitable — neither of which produces a usable archaeological record.
• ⚠ Florida owns archaeological resources on its state-owned submerged land under Chapter 267, and removing material without a permit is unlawful. The romantic picture of shipwreck salvage in Florida waters is largely a description of an offence.
• Federal law adds further protection — sunken military craft remain the property of their flag state regardless of age or location, and a Spanish colonial warship or a sunken United States naval vessel is not abandoned property.
• Human remains are frequently present on wreck sites, which are grave sites as well as archaeological ones.
• ⚠ Report finds rather than recovering them. A diver who records a position and reports it has done something valuable; one who surfaces with an object has removed the context and may have committed an offence.
• Be careful how salvage is presented in popular media. Television treatments routinely frame commercial recovery as discovery, and being able to explain the difference clearly is a professional skill.

⚠⚠ What survives underwater, and why it makes conservation the binding constraint

• Anaerobic, waterlogged burial preserves organic material that would not survive on land — wood, rope, leather, textile, and seeds. This is why shipwreck sites can be extraordinarily informative.
• ⚠⚠ And it is why recovery without conservation destroys them. Waterlogged wood is held together by water; a timber allowed to dry uncontrolled will shrink, warp, and disintegrate, and the object that survived four centuries can be lost in a week on a dock.
• Iron in seawater forms a concretion that frequently preserves a void in the exact shape of the original object even after the metal is gone — and the concretion is the artefact, which is why it must not simply be cleaned off.
• Conservation is slow and expensive. Treating a large waterlogged timber assemblage takes years and specialised facilities, which is why the honest question before any recovery is whether the conservation can actually be funded.
• ⚠ Recovering more than you can conserve is a recognised failure mode, and there are collections in this condition around the world.
• In-situ preservation is frequently the correct answer — monitoring and protecting a site where it lies, rather than excavating it.
• Keep material wet from the moment of recovery, and plan the conservation route before lifting anything.
• Document in place. Recording, photogrammetry, and survey extract a great deal of information without recovery at all.

⚠⚠ Excavation is destruction — this is the discipline's founding constraint

• An archaeological site can be excavated once. Removing an artefact destroys its context permanently, and context is where nearly all the information is — an object without its associations is a curiosity rather than evidence.
• ⚠ Which is why recording is the actual work. The excavation produces notes, drawings, photographs, elevations, and samples; the site itself is gone, and the record is all that survives of it. A dig with poor records has destroyed a site and produced nothing.
• ⚠⚠ Do not excavate what does not need excavating. Modern practice presumes preservation in place: survey, non-invasive methods, and leaving the deposit for better techniques later are frequently the professionally correct answer, and a research question that could be answered without digging should be.
• Sample deliberately and leave some of the site intact where you can, so future archaeologists with better methods have material to work with. Everything we can do now, someone will do better in fifty years.
• ⚠ Excavation without a curation plan is destruction with extra steps. See the curation note below — artefacts that cannot be housed, catalogued and kept accessible have not been saved.
• Publish, or the destruction was for nothing. Unpublished excavation is a recognised and serious failure in this discipline, and a substantial amount of twentieth-century fieldwork sits unreported in boxes.
• Record what you did not find as well as what you did. Negative evidence is evidence, and it is routinely discarded.
• ⚠ Stratigraphy cannot be reconstructed after the fact. If the layers were not recorded as they were removed, the sequence is lost, and with it the chronology.

⚠⚠ The antiquities market, human remains, and the curation crisis

• ⚠⚠ Do not buy, sell, or appraise antiquities. The professional societies' ethics principles treat commercialisation of the archaeological record as incompatible with the discipline, because market demand is what funds looting — and looting destroys context, which destroys the information, permanently.
• An artefact with no provenance is frequently a looted artefact, and authenticating or publishing one raises its market value and rewards the destruction that produced it.
• ⚠ Human remains require consultation, not just permits. Descendant communities have legitimate authority over the treatment of their ancestors, and the discipline's history here is genuinely bad — remains were collected, measured, and retained without consent for well over a century.
• Consult early and continuously, not at the end. Consultation presented as a formality after decisions are made is not consultation, and it is recognised as such.
• Treat remains with the care you would want for your own relatives, including in photography, in storage, and in how they are discussed.
• ⚠⚠ The curation crisis is real and it is the discipline's quiet failure. Repositories across the country are full; excavated collections sit uncatalogued, inaccessible, and in some cases deteriorating, and some institutions will no longer accept new material. Curation is expensive, it is permanent, and it must be funded before excavation, not after.
• Budget for curation in the project, and confirm a repository will accept the collection before a trowel goes in the ground.
• Existing collections are an underused research resource. A great deal of publishable work can be done on material already excavated and never analysed — and it costs no new destruction.
• ⚠ Archaeology has been used to support political claims about land and identity, sometimes disastrously. Interpretations carry consequences beyond the discipline, and stating the strength of the evidence honestly matters.

⚠⚠ Archaeology is heavily regulated — and most American archaeological work exists because of it

• The National Historic Preservation Act, and particularly its Section 106 process, requires federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. ⚠ This is the single largest driver of archaeological employment in the United States — the great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance, not academia.
• The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) governs archaeological resources on federal and tribal land, requires permits for excavation, and makes unauthorised excavation, removal, and trafficking a federal offence with substantial penalties.
• ⚠⚠ NAGPRA — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — governs human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. It creates consultation and repatriation obligations and it changed the discipline profoundly. Understand it as a legal requirement and as an ethical correction to a real history, not as an obstacle.
• ⚠ Florida: Chapter 267, Florida Statutes vests authority in the Division of Historical Resources and declares archaeological resources on state-owned land and on state-owned submerged land to be state property. Collecting from them without a permit is unlawful.
• ⚠⚠ Florida section 872.05 makes it a felony to knowingly disturb an unmarked human burial. Unmarked burials are common on Florida sites, and if human remains are encountered, work stops and the process defined by that statute is followed — this is one of the most important things a Florida archaeologist knows.
• The Florida Master Site File is the state's inventory of archaeological and historical sites; recording sites into it is a professional obligation, and consulting it is the first step of any project.
• State and local permits, and tribal consultation, apply on top of the federal framework.
• ⚠ Metal detecting and surface collecting are restricted on public land and prohibited on many sites; a hobby elsewhere is an offence here.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Preservation law, regulations, and tribal consultation requirements change — verify with the State Historic Preservation Office and the relevant agency rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live across this prefix, most of which sits at the upper-division levels.

ANT3137 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida, taught with an emphasis on Pensacola's maritime heritage.

See this repository's ANT4418 (Maritime Cultures) and the UWF field methods guides for the rest of this pathway.