Maritime Archaeological Field Methods

Course Description

Maritime Archaeological Field Methods is onsite training in maritime archaeology providing structured hands-on experience including training in both field and laboratory methods. Emphasised methods include site control grids, setting up excavation units, basic excavation techniques, use of hand tools, identification of ship structure and features, screening techniques, field documentation, principles and use of field instruments, and field conservation procedures.

⚠⚠ A diving certificate from a nationally recognised programme and permission are required, and a Material and Supply Fee will be assessed. Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix; UWF publishes this at 1–9 semester hours with ANT3101 as prerequisite.

⚠⚠ Credit may not be earned in both ANT4135 and ANT4835

The catalog states this explicitly, and it is a construction worth noticing. The two numbers cover overlapping material, and taking one forecloses credit for the other — so a student who has already taken, or is considering, ANT4135 needs to choose deliberately rather than discovering the restriction at graduation audit. Confirm with an advisor which number your programme expects.

Underwater excavation is terrestrial excavation with every constraint made worse. The recording standards are the same, the stratigraphic logic is the same, and the diver has limited bottom time, restricted visibility, negative buoyancy problems, and no ability to step back and look at the trench. Which is why maritime field methods spend so much effort on grids, systems, and pre-dive planning: the thinking has to be done on the surface, because underwater there is no time to improvise.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Plan and execute dives for archaeological work within programme limits.
• Establish and maintain a site control grid underwater.
• Set up excavation units on a submerged site.
• Excavate underwater using hand tools and controlled technique.
• Operate induction dredges or airlifts where the project uses them.
• Manage spoil and maintain visibility during excavation.
• Maintain provenience control in a submerged context.
• Screen recovered material underwater or at the surface.
• Identify ship structure and describe its components.
• Recognise and record vessel features and construction details.
• Record underwater using drawing, measurement, and photography.
• Apply baseline offset and trilateration recording methods.
• Produce accurate underwater site plans.
• Use field instruments appropriate to submerged work.
• Apply field conservation procedures to recovered material.
• Keep recovered material wet and stable from the moment of recovery.
• Complete field records and dive logs accurately.
• Work effectively as part of a dive team.
• Apply scientific diving safety practice throughout.
• Recognise and manage task loading underwater.
• Describe emergency procedures and act on them.
• Describe the legal framework governing submerged cultural resources.
• Describe ethical obligations specific to wreck sites.
• Describe the transition from field records to report.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe photogrammetry and three-dimensional recording of wreck sites.
• Describe remote sensing integration with excavation.
• Describe in-situ preservation and site monitoring.
• Describe deep-water archaeology at an awareness level.
• Describe the conservation pipeline for a maritime assemblage.
• Describe maritime CRM and marine permitting work.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Dive planning for archaeological work
• Underwater site control grids
• Submerged excavation units
• Underwater excavation technique
• Dredges and airlifts
• Spoil and visibility management
• Provenience control underwater
• Screening
• Ship structure identification
• Recording vessel features
• Underwater drawing, measurement, photography
• Baseline offset and trilateration
• Site plans
• Field instruments
• Field conservation
• Keeping material wet and stable
• Field records and dive logs
• Dive team work
• Scientific diving safety
• Task loading
• Emergency procedures
• Law governing submerged resources
• Wreck site ethics
• From field records to report

Optional Topics

• Photogrammetry and 3D recording
• Remote sensing integration
• In-situ preservation and monitoring
• Deep-water archaeology
• The conservation pipeline
• Maritime CRM and permitting

Resources & Tools

• Society for American Archaeology (saa.org) — free Principles of Archaeological Ethics, and inexpensive student membership.
• Register of Professional Archaeologists (rpanet.org) — free; its eligibility criteria state exactly what a professional archaeologist is expected to have done, and a field school is on the list.
• Florida Division of Historical Resources and the Florida Master Site File (dos.fl.gov/historical) — free; Chapter 267, permitting, and the survey forms this work produces.
• Florida Public Archaeology Network (fpan.us) — free programmes and volunteer fieldwork across the state.
• Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (achp.gov) — free; the Section 106 regulations that generate most survey work.
• Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology (acuaonline.org) — the professional body for this sub-discipline, and its positions on commercial salvage.
• American Academy of Underwater Sciences (aaus.org) — the standards scientific diving operates under; read them before assuming a recreational certification is sufficient.
• Divers Alert Network (dan.org) — emergency support, dive medicine guidance, and inexpensive insurance; join before a field season, not after an incident.
• Florida's Underwater Archaeological Preserves (museumsinthesea.com) — free; interpreted wreck sites you can dive lawfully.

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, driven by Section 106 and its state equivalents rather than by research funding.
• Field technician — the entry-level role, and a field school is the standard prerequisite for it.
• Crew chief, project archaeologist, principal investigator — the CRM progression; a graduate degree is generally needed above technician.
• State and federal agencies — SHPOs, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, 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.
• ⚠ Be realistic about entry conditions. Field technician work is seasonal, project-based, frequently far from home, and modestly paid. Many do it for a few years and then move up, move into agency or museum work, or leave.
• Maritime and underwater archaeology — a small, competitive speciality; ⚠ it requires scientific diving qualification on top of archaeological training.
• State submerged lands programmes and underwater preserve management.
• Marine survey and offshore archaeological clearance — where the commercial demand is.

Special Information

⚠⚠ This is a variable-credit course — the published range is 1 to 9 semester hours

• UWF publishes this course at 1–9 sh, not at a single value. The credit earned depends on the length and structure of the field season, and it is agreed with the department rather than fixed by the catalog.
• ⚠ The figures shown in this guide are a representative case, not the course's value. They assume 6 semester hours over 6 weeks, at roughly 40 hours a week — the normal pattern for a full-time archaeological field school — giving approximately 240 contact hours. Confirm the credit, dates, and duration with the department before enrolling.
• Contact hours scale with the credit taken, so a student registering for fewer semester hours should scale the figure down proportionally.
• ⚠⚠ A field school is a full-time commitment, whatever the credit says. This is the single most important practical fact about it: you cannot hold a normal job during a field season, and the credit value badly understates the time. Plan employment and finances around it a term ahead.
• A Material and Supply Fee is assessed, and there are usually further costs — travel, accommodation, equipment, and personal gear. Ask for the total cost, not the tuition. Diving adds equipment and certification costs on top.

⚠⚠ Scientific diving is not recreational diving — and the distinction is legal as well as practical

• ⚠⚠ A recreational certification does not qualify you to dive scientifically. Open-water certification teaches you to dive for pleasure within narrow limits; scientific diving means working underwater while task-loaded — recording, measuring, excavating — which is a substantially higher demand on skill and gas planning.
• ⚠ Scientific diving in the United States operates under an organisational framework, not individual discretion. Programmes follow AAUS (American Academy of Underwater Sciences) standards under a Diving Control Board and a Diving Safety Officer, which is what allows scientific diving to be conducted outside the commercial diving regulations. You dive under the programme's authorisation, to its limits, with its logging and its buddy requirements.
• Medical clearance is required, and it is a real examination rather than a form. ⚠ Some conditions are disqualifying and some are waiverable — asthma, ear and sinus problems, seizure disorders, and cardiac conditions among them. Get screened before you invest in the pathway.
• ⚠⚠ Never hold your breath on ascent. Expanding gas ruptures lung tissue and can drive gas into the arterial circulation — arterial gas embolism can be fatal within minutes and can occur from a depth of only a few metres. It is the fastest-acting diving injury and it is entirely preventable.
• Understand decompression sickness, nitrogen narcosis, and oxygen toxicity, and plan dives with real margins rather than to the limit of a table or computer.
• ⚠ Respect the surface interval and the flying-after-diving rule. Travelling home too soon after a field season has caused real injuries.
• Archaeological diving is frequently harder than the diving people trained on — low or zero visibility, current, entanglement in lines and grids, overhead obstructions, and long bottom times on repetitive dives. Task loading is what turns a manageable dive into an incident.
• Know the emergency plan before you enter the water: the nearest recompression chamber, the evacuation route, and the emergency contact. Divers Alert Network (DAN) is the standard resource, and membership is inexpensive.
• ⚠⚠ Call a dive you are not comfortable with. Anyone may end a dive at any time for any reason, without explanation and without argument — this is a core rule of the discipline and a programme that does not honour it is not one to dive with.

⚠ Recording underwater: the thinking is done on the surface

• Bottom time is the binding constraint on everything. A diver has a fixed and short working period, so every task must be planned, briefed, and rehearsed before entering the water.
• ⚠ Improvising underwater is how dives go wrong. Task loading — trying to solve a problem while managing buoyancy, gas, and a colleague — is the mechanism behind most incidents in scientific diving.
• Grids and baselines do the work that eyes do on land. Because you cannot step back and look at the trench, the recording system has to substitute for the overview — which is why baseline offset and trilateration are taught as core skills.
• Write underwater, and write immediately. Slates and dive logs are filled in at depth or on the boat; memory after a dive is unreliable in ways divers consistently underestimate.
• ⚠ Manage spoil deliberately. Excavated sediment destroys visibility for everyone on the site, and a badly placed dredge outflow can end the working day for the whole team.
• Buoyancy control is a recording skill. A diver who cannot hold position damages the site and the drawing.
• ⚠⚠ Keep recovered material wet from the moment it leaves the seabed. Waterlogged wood, leather and organics begin to be destroyed as soon as they start to dry, and an object that survived centuries can be lost in a day.
• Do not recover what cannot be conserved. See the conservation note in this repository's ANT4182C guide — recovering more than the project can treat is a recognised failure mode.
• Photograph and record in place first. A great deal is extractable without lifting anything.

⚠⚠ Excavation is destruction, and the record is what survives

• A site can be excavated once. Removing material destroys its context permanently, and context is where nearly all the information is.
• ⚠ Which is why recording is the actual work. The site is gone; the notes, drawings, photographs and samples are what remains of it. A dig with poor records has destroyed a site and produced nothing.
• ⚠⚠ Do not collect. Surface collecting, souvenir-taking, and metal detecting on a project or a public site are unprofessional and frequently unlawful — and a single artefact pocketed by a student is context destroyed and a career jeopardised.
• Do not buy, sell, or appraise antiquities. The professional societies treat commercialisation of the archaeological record as incompatible with the discipline, because market demand is what funds looting.
• Curation must be planned and funded before excavation, not after. Repositories are full, and excavation without a curation plan is destruction with extra steps.
• ⚠ Human remains require consultation, not just permits, and descendant communities have legitimate authority over the treatment of their ancestors.
• Publish, or the destruction was for nothing. Unreported fieldwork is a recognised failure in this discipline.
• ⚠ Report finds rather than recovering them when you are not on an authorised project. A recorded position is valuable; a surfaced object is context destroyed.

⚠⚠ The legal framework, and why survey work sits inside it

• Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to consider effects on historic properties, and it is the single largest driver of archaeological employment in the United States — most professional survey work exists because of it.
• The Archaeological Resources Protection Act governs archaeological resources on federal and tribal land and makes unauthorised excavation, removal, and trafficking a federal offence.
• ⚠⚠ NAGPRA governs human remains, funerary and sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony, creating consultation and repatriation obligations.
• ⚠ Florida Chapter 267 vests archaeological resources on state-owned land and state-owned submerged land in the state. Collecting from them without a permit is unlawful — which matters directly to anyone diving on a Florida wreck.
• ⚠⚠ Florida section 872.05 makes it a felony to knowingly disturb an unmarked human burial. If human remains are encountered, work stops and the statutory process is followed.
• The Florida Master Site File is the state inventory; recording sites into it is a professional obligation, and its forms are a standard survey deliverable.
• Sunken military craft remain flag-state property regardless of age or location — a Spanish colonial warship or a United States naval vessel is not abandoned property.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Preservation law and consultation requirements change; verify with the State Historic Preservation Office and the relevant agency.

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.

ANT4835 is published at 1–9 semester hours at the University of West Florida, with ANT3101 as prerequisite, a diving certificate and permission required, and a Material and Supply Fee.

⚠ Credit may not be earned in both ANT4135 and ANT4835 — confirm with an advisor which your programme expects.