The
Nautical
Archaeology
Digital Library

Filipe Castro

Filipe Castro received a Licenciatura in Civil Engineering from the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa in 1984, an M.B.A. from the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University in 2001. He has conducted most of his research in Portugal where he started his collaboration with Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arqueologia as an amateur in 1992.

The Cultural Affiliation of Shipwrecks

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Identity is a central in archaeology. Archaeologists associate the concept of identity with human beings as it refers to age, gender, ethnicity, religion and status. It can either describes individual or group identity and one can have more than one.

However, how can archaeologists articulate the notion of identity when dealing with architectural remains? When applied to a shipwreck, the notion of identity can be applied to the humans and artefacts on board, to the humans and countries involved in its construction and the architectural features.

A first definition for identity could refer to the humans on board. The use of material culture to determine the ethnicity of those aboard the vessel is common in the study of shipwrecks, especially for the antique ones as artefacts are often the only remains left. The identification of cargo and daily life artifacts can lead to the identification of trade networks but also to the ethnic identification of some people on board.

However, studies on onboard people identity do not always match the nationality of a ship itself. People were mobile, and their presence on board only reflects only a small period of time in the ship’s history, often the last trip. Crews were often multi-ethnic, and do not necessarily reflect the nationality of the ship. The same problem is encountered with the cargo. The origins of the artifact found on a wreck can improve our understanding of trade networks, but they can be independent from the ship itself.

Regarding the ship itself, the flag or ownership under which the ship once sailed could be seen as a good way to identify the nationality of the ship, but only when historical records are available. One should, however, keep in mind that ships could be bought from another country or that ships can be captured and sail under new ownership.

The location of the shipyard can be a good indication of a ship’s nationality, but it is not always available through historical records. Moreover, knowing where the ship was built does not always indicate who built the ship, and it cannot exclude the potential presence of foreign shipwrights building who might have constructed it on commission. Through analysis of the wood, it is also possible to pinpoint a general origin from the timbers used but again, timbers traveled across territories.

Finally, the shipwreck itself can have its identity associated with its architectural features. For example, studies led on ship build in the Iberian Peninsula during the 15-16th century show that they share similar construction features. Other shipbuilding traditions can share common features or common measurement system that can provide archaeologists with some indications of the ship’s origins.

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Whether it is the association of the ship to a specific type, function, region, tradition or, in some case, its name and country of origin, these associations are important for the discipline of nautical archaeology. The possibilities are numerous, and they all reflect different levels of the identity in a ship. It is part of the archaeologist role to understand their ship identity through all the evidence found on the shipwreck site!

Seven Months!

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This web page started seven months ago.  We have now over 300 pages uploaded and we are working on as many more.  Certainly due to the fact that we are still far from having uploaded 20% of the intended content, so far we have received about 10 visits per day.

Yesterday’s NADL weekly meeting: Kyle, Filipe, Ricardo, Patricia, and Mahesh. Fravio Calippo was not in the frame when we made this screen capture.

We just hope that the team – now with approximately 20 contributors – will keep growing and that this page establishes itself as a community, as opposed to a hierarchy, and becomes a useful source of information in maritime archaeology and a resource in the fight against treasure hunting.

Our focus is now on making navigation easy and clear, allowing for quick searches and providing a good understanding of the page’s architecture.

As this page started as, and is still an experiment for computer science, visualization, and maritime archaeology students, we expect it to change in time and improve as it grows.

Sharing primary data before the work is over

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Some archaeologists live in fear that their excavations might be published by somebody else, should their colleagues come across their primary data. Most archaeologists, however, don’t even publish their own excavations. It is difficult to imagine why anybody, unwilling or incapable of publishing their own work, would publish a colleague’s excavation.

Other archaeologists live in fear of being caught making a mistake. Once a colleague told me that he did not want to share his primary data – even after the work was over – because there might be mistakes and he did not want his colleagues to find them. This attitude reflects an understanding of archaeology as a competitive discipline in which our colleagues are our adversaries. It is difficult to imagine what archaeologists can compete for. Certainly not for power, or money, or glory. Are we even ranked? But the point is that if we are competing it is impossible to build a community engaged in the pursuit of a better understanding of the past. Competition is the opposite of community.

Sharing primary data as we gather it allows us to get early peer reviews from our colleagues. If there are mistakes in our data or methodology, we can correct them early and thank our colleagues for their constructive input. Making mistakes is not a crime. I know of a reputed scholar, known for his especially harsh criticism of most of his colleagues, that once sent an article for peer review with two orthographic mistakes in the title alone.

Although an obnoxious critique of our work can be annoying, these situations are largely compensated by the constructive input of our colleagues. Moreover, being criticized is unavoidable. How many times have we heard people attacking ideas that they don’t understand, or commenting on colleagues’ work from hearsay, without having read it? Critiques are a part of any adult life. And idiotic critiques are harmless because archaeology is a small field and we all know everybody.

Sharing primary data is the basis for any serious discipline. Our results should be supported by data. And sharing partial results should be a generalized practice. All our works will need to be reanalyzed in a few years. Archaeology is an iterative discipline.

Archaeology is public or it is nothing

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NADL Team in the ShipLAB: Mahesh Naidu, Alicia Kincaid, Rick Futruta, Naveed Khimani, and Kyle Pence. Fall 2019.

Social media is making archaeology public and helping archaeologists to share their discoveries and ideas to a wider than ever public. This trend is creating a public for archaeology that is already the best ally of the cultural heritage.

The social value of archaeology lies on its contribution to the public understanding of the world. As most kids around the world are in school today – something that never happened before – we expect to see, in a near future,  the rise of diverse interpretations of archaeological data, and the development of more diverse narratives about our common past.

The internet has been an exceptional tool for the democratization of knowledge and it is great to see that as the older archaeologists retire, a new group of young archaeologists is emerging with a new paradigm, less secretive, less complicated, less competitive, and more engaged politically. Teams are becoming increasingly more diverse, and archaeology is moving away from the ivory tower paradigm – or dungeon, as a colleague of mine likes to say – and being replaced by a much more serious and creative multidisciplinary discipline that is both more intelligent, and much more fun. This is even true for the cultural resource management world. Organizations like the Maritime Archaeology Trust (UK) are working hard to share their discoveries online in ever more creative ways, and companies like ASI (Canada) are making all their reports available online.

At Texas A&M University we are celebrating this paradigm change and trying to put all our data online in creative and hopefully fun ways, with the skills and creativity of computer science and visualization students.

Standardizing the publication of wooden hull structures

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As we work on our shipbuilding databases it becomes increasing evident that we must standardize the description of wooden hull structures, in the same way biologists standardized the description of insects.

There are many reasons why primary data and excavation reports are not accessible to the general public, but the most important are obvious and easy to address.

Many wooden remains of ancient ships are only partially published and some are not published at all. Some archaeologists are notoriously slow  in publishing their results, others are implausibly secretive, and most don’t share their primary data. And this makes it very difficult to implement comparative studies.

J. Richard Steffy argued already in the 1990s that computers were opening a wide range of avenues of research in the study of wooden shipbuilding. Twenty-five years later, we are renewing his plea for nautical archaeologists to adopt our proposed methodology – Castro, F., Bendig, C., Bérubé, M., Borrero, R., Budsberg, N., Dostal, C., Monteiro, A., Smith, C., Torres, R., and Yamafune, K., 2018. “Recording, Publishing, and Reconstructing Wooden Shipwrecks” Journal of Maritime Archaeology, 13.1: 55-66 – or to propose better ones.