Video transcript

How do you do maritime archaeology

DR JULIAN WHITEWRIGHT: Maritime archaeology is an incredibly broad and diverse subject
and doing maritime archaeology encompasses an equally broad and diverse range of methods
and techniques. To help you understand some of these methods and techniques, we've asked
some of our students, some of our colleagues, to tell us how they do maritime archaeology.
SPEAKER 1: Depending on your own skills and qualification, you can do maritime archaeology
under water but we also have loads of maritime archaeologists that have never set a foot
under water.
SPEAKER 2: There's a great deal of theoretical input that you can use so desk based work is
really important.
SPEAKER 3: We often think of divers working on a shipwreck but maritime archaeology uses a
wide range of methods; everything from measuring tapes to 3D modelling, from
dendrochronology to mass spectrometry. When you have the potential to find a cannon one
day and an intact human brain the next, you have to apply all the possible methods available
in science.
SPEAKER 4: So you do research, you read a lot, you get in touch with the artefact and with
your material culture and interact with it.
SPEAKER 5: A lot of what we do is very similar to what we do on terrestrial sites but there are
some big differences, for example, the way that we remove sediment from the site: On
terrestrial sites, you can simply do this with a trowel and a bucket and a wheelbarrow but
underwater those things are not that evident and we use something called an airlift, which is
basically a vacuum cleaner for underwater, which sucks up the sediment and transports it to
somewhere else where it's out of our way.
SPEAKER 6: We use computer programmes, such as geographical information systems, also
known as GIS, as well as a lot of geophysical surveys to study these larger coastal
landscapes.

University of Southampton 2014

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Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds

Video transcript
SPEAKER 7: One of the main reasons that got me into maritime archaeology is that the
practice of it largely involves underwater research excavation. Scuba diving is definitely a big
part of the practice of maritime archaeology, as is shipbuilding, which is what we're doing
here today. And that's kind of the aspect of it that I liked was the adventure of it.
DR JULIAN WHITEWRIGHT: So we've explained to you how we do maritime archaeology here
at the University of Southampton but it's not just about us doing maritime archaeology. We
would like you to be able to do maritime archaeology, as well, so please see the list of links
for how you can get involved in maritime archaeology wherever you are in the world.

University of Southampton 2014

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Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds