This year, we are honored to welcome Dr. Jennifer McKinnon from ECU as our guest speaker. Dr. McKinnon has a background in historical and maritime archaeology and cultural heritage management. She has worked in the US, Australia, the Pacific, and Europe on sites ranging from the colonial period to WWII. From 10:30-11:30am, come see give a public lecture in Scoates 208 about her work with battlefield archaeology in the Pacific.
After that from 12-4pm the Nautical Archaeology Program will be opening up its labs to the public. Attendees will get to see the work being done in these labs, and speak to the archaeologists who work in them. In addition, Shipwreck Weekend has activities for guests of all ages to participate in. There will be a scavenger hunt, mini-excavations, SCUBA gear to try on, 3D scanning, ship models to color and construct, and much more!
For more information, please check out our Facebook, Instagram, or contact us at tamushipwreckweekend@gmail.com. We look forward to seeing you there!
]]>Guest speaker Dr. Pat Tanner from University College Cork gave a public lecture on his work creating digital models of shipwrecks, after which the NAP opened its doors to the public for the rest of the day. Attendees got to visit the NAP’s numerous laboratories, meet the people working in them, learn about the research they are currently doing, and experience being a nautical archeologist for themselves!
The open house included several activities for attendees of all ages, including trying on Scuba gear, practicing writing underwater, coloring and constructing their own ships, 3D scanning, and finding real artifacts.
Thank you to all who attended, and we look forward to seeing you again at Shipwreck Weekend 2024!
]]>When nautical archaeology graduate student Stephen DeCasien was invited by a colleague to be part of the Battle of the Egadi Islands Project, he was ecstatic. The site off the coast of western Sicily is the only known ancient naval battlefield ever discovered — nautical archaeologists have recovered 26 Roman and Carthaginian naval rams and other artifacts from a battle on the Mediterranean Sea that took place in 241 BCE during the First Punic War.
One of DeCasien’s research interests, naval rams are ancient bronze weapons that were fitted to the bows of Greek and Roman warships and used to ram holes into the hulls of enemy ships. Unfortunately for the New Jersey native, the invitation to the historic site came in fall 2019; before he could get to Sicily, the worldwide pandemic began and travel became impossible.
It was a sorely missed opportunity and he didn’t forget it.
Then in spring 2021, in a class led by Dr. Christopher Dostal, director of the Texas A&M Conservation Research Laboratory and the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation (CMAC), DeCasien was learning about casting techniques and ways to conserve metal objects.
“I thought to myself, if I couldn’t see any rams due to COVID, maybe I could make my own,” he said. “I pitched my insane idea to Dr. Dostal with no proposal or plan on how we’d do it, and without hesitation, Dostal replied, ‘Let’s do it!’”
Dostal, an assistant professor of nautical archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences, specializes in historical-period maritime archaeology, the conservation and preservation of waterlogged artifacts, and digital imaging and 3D modeling of archaeological artifacts.
“It was a pretty bold idea,” Dostal said. “Stephen was in my Conservation II course, and we were experimenting with a version of lost-wax casting that uses 3D printing instead of silicone molding when he had the idea to do one on a grand scale.”
Lost-wax casting is a process whereby a bronze metal sculpture is cast from a clay, wax or wooden mold. The practice dates back more than 5,000 years and had developed independently in several regions.
“At our lab, the things we cast are almost always smaller than a deck of cards, so I thought, ‘If we do this, where are we going to cast it?’” Dostal said. “And how are we going to pay for it?”
The latter turned out to be fairly easy.
“I’m lucky enough to hold the Institute of Nautical Archaeology Faculty Fellowship, which allowed me to help fund this project,” Dostal said. “I told Stephen I was into the idea, but he should know that he was taking on a huge project. To his credit, this was a passion project and he put in a lot of work. There are many things we don’t know about the construction of ancient rams, and sometimes we simply have to learn by doing.”
DeCasien, with support from Dostal and Glenn Grieco, director of the CMAC Ship Model Laboratory, followed a three-step process to create the ram. First, he constructed a wooden ship bow to serve as the beeswax model’s core; second, he created the beeswax model; and third was the lost-wax casting which was done at Pyrology Foundry and Studio in Bastrop, Texas.
“The foundry used a similar method to the one used in antiquity,” DeCasien said. “Several channels were added to the beeswax model to allow the molten bronze to be poured in for casting. The model was placed in a casting slurry which created a protective shell around it. This shell was heated to melt the beeswax out, leaving the shell empty with the channels still intact. Molten bronze was poured in the shell, filling the areas where beeswax once was. The bronze was allowed to cool, and then the shell was broken open, leaving an exact replica of the beeswax model in bronze behind.”
The result is the first new naval ram made using ancient techniques in more than 1,500 years. It was so notable, Popular Mechanics published an article about it earlier this year.
And like any good Ag would do, DeCasien stamped the ram with the Texas A&M mark.
The project gave the researchers more insight into the lives of ancient peoples, DeCasien said, noting it’s safe to assume that naval rams were likely expensive, time-consuming to build and crafted to the highest standards in antiquity.
“The reconstructed ram also reinforced the notion that naval rams were part of an ‘industrialized’ weapon system,” he said. “It tells us more about the socioeconomic implications of building ancient navies and the ways in which peoples living around the ancient Mediterranean basin conducted naval warfare.”
In summer 2022, another opportunity arose for DeCasien to study those 2,000-year-old naval rams lifted from the Mediterranean sea floor. He spent a month in Sicily, working as a member of the RPM Nautical Foundation team under the supervision of the Soprintendenza del Mare, the region’s department of cultural heritage and identity.
Once he earns his doctorate, DeCasien said he plans to be a researcher and teacher.
“I hope to find an academic job where I can share my passion of ancient Greek and Roman maritime history with other enthusiastic scholars and students, as well as continue my research on ancient naval warfare,” he said, noting the ram project couldn’t have been done anywhere else but Texas A&M.
“Our professors and graduate students are driven to change how scholars and the general public view the human past through archaeological discoveries and teaching. This type of project would have been impossible anywhere else, as housed in our department, we have some of the foremost scholars in pre-classical and classical seafaring, shipbuilding techniques, conservation and the reconstruction of ships.”
This story was originally published by Texas A&M Today.
At a humble facility that once served as the fire station for the Bryan Air Force Base, the timbers of an 18th-century merchant ship lie submerged in a row of long, shallow tanks, quietly awaiting their final voyage home.
Over the next few years, a team of Texas A&M University professors and students will carefully conserve the salvaged remains of a colonial-era shipwreck before sending the pieces back to Alexandria, Virginia, where the wreck was originally discovered in 2015.
It’s a big job, says Chris Dostal, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology’s Nautical Archaeology Program and director of the Conservation Research Laboratory, located at the RELLIS Campus in Bryan. But as Dostal explains, Texas A&M is one of just a handful of institutions in the country with the knowledge and resources to permanently preserve this important piece of American history.
“There’s only a few places that do underwater archaeology conservation,” said Dostal, who earned both his master’s and Ph.D. in anthropology at Texas A&M in 2015 and 2017, respectively. “And I would say the vast majority of those places are all run by Aggies.”
In the mid-to-late 1700s, the city of Alexandria was quickly becoming one of the busiest ports in America. Situated along the banks of the Potomac River, its harbor was a popular spot for merchant ships to stop and unload goods from all around the world.
These ships were sort of like the 18-wheelers of their day, Dostal said — simple, sturdy vessels built to carry tons of cargo from port to port. For 18th century Alexandrians, they would have been a wholly unremarkable sight. But to today’s archaeologists, they’re a rare treasure.
“We don’t have many archaeological remains of these ships because it’s just like a big rig — you don’t really think of it as important,” he said. “So they weren’t very well-documented, and very few of them are preserved.”
That’s why the discovery of this ship and three others like it within the span of a few years in Alexandria was such a big deal: “It’s like hitting the jackpot,” Dostal said.
All four ships were discovered by accident when construction crews started digging into the ground near the city’s present-day waterfront. The first ship, unearthed in 2015 during construction of the since-completed Hotel Indigo, was sent to Texas A&M for permanent conservation.
Dostal said this ship was probably constructed sometime during the 1750s, making it more than 260 years old.
The three other wrecks, dug up at a different site in 2018, now lie at the bottom of a pond in Alexandria’s Ben Brenman Park. The longer the water-logged wood is allowed to dry out, the more it deteriorates, Dostal said. Submerging the ships will help keep them safe for additional research and preservation efforts in the future.
When discoveries like this are made, Aggies are often at the center of the action. The university’s world-renowned nautical archaeology program has been at the forefront of this growing field since the 1970s, when father of underwater archaeology George F. Bass chose Texas A&M as the permanent home for his research institute.
When the first Alexandria wreck was dug up in 2015, Dostal was an A&M graduate student. He and a group of fellow Aggies made the trip to Virginia to help catalog the discovery, using a unique digital scanning technique Dostal developed while studying another 18th-century ship unearthed at the site of the World Trade Center. They have since made at least eight return trips to Alexandria to scan the other three wrecks.
“Because it’s such a lengthy process, I really wanted to have all the data in front of us so that we could study the ship before all of that was done,” Dostal said.
Now, while the pieces of the Hotel Indigo ship sit in vats of liquid at RELLIS, Dostal can hold a 3D-printed replica in his hand and use it to explain the team’s findings. Additional models were sent to a local museum in Alexandria so residents can learn more about the seafaring history of their city.
“We’ve been able to see all kinds of technological innovations that were being utilized at the time, the shortcuts being used during construction, and sort of the mindset of the shipbuilders,” Dostal said.
For instance, the Hotel Indigo ship would have been unnecessarily strong for its time, he explained, owing to the large number of timbers packed close together to create the ship’s frame.
“When Europeans got to the Americas, one of the things they were struck by was the amount of trees that were here,” Dostal said. “So they started building ships with this really close framing, which is incredibly unnecessary for shipbuilding, but they figured, ‘We might as well make it as strong as possible.’”
Thinking about why the ships were found underground and not at the bottom of the river opens up another window into Alexandria’s past. When these vessels had outlived their usefulness as cargo ships, Dostal said they were sawed in half and intentionally buried to help expand the city’s waterfront.
“In the 18th century, landowners started to break down the bluffs that were behind them and push the dirt into the bay, essentially creating a false chunk of land,” he said. “While they were doing that, they were using old ships, cutting the timbers across the keel until they broke open and then kind of using them as a pier or a retaining wall. So that’s why the ships were there in the first place.”
For Dostal and the team at the Conservation Research Laboratory, the ultimate goal is to return the Hotel Indigo ship to Alexandria in the best shape possible. Getting to that point has already involved years of hard work, and as Dostal explains, there’s still much to be done.
Transporting the wreck from Virginia to Texas was a monumental effort in its own right, as crews wrapped each piece in wet towels and foam to help the wood retain its moisture during the 1,400-mile truck ride. Now, the challenge is to safely remove all that moisture while keeping each piece intact.
“When it was buried, the wood was below the water table, so water was attacking the cells of the wood the whole time,” Dostal said. “Think of it like this: if you make a lasagna and you have a bunch of baked-on stuff around the edge, you just put the pan under the water and let the water break it down. It does the same thing to wood over time.”
Eventually, the water breaks down key components of the wood’s cellular structure, like cellulose and lignin, until the only thing keeping the cells from collapsing is the water itself, filling up each cell like a balloon.
Therein lies the problem, Dostal said: “There’s no other material in the cells to help them keep their shape, so if you let the water come out, it’ll just collapse,” ultimately turning the wood to dust.
To prevent this, the team is soaking each and every piece in a solution of polyethylene glycol. This water-soluble wax will slowly be absorbed by the wood cells, replacing the water and shoring up the structure of the cells before the timbers are removed from the liquid and placed in a massive freeze dryer.
Like the process used for snacks like astronaut ice cream, freeze drying allows Dostal and his crew to quickly remove any remaining moisture from the wood without risking additional deterioration — by letting the water escape as a gas instead of seeping out as a liquid and causing more damage to the wood along the way.
It’s the same process Aggies used to preserve La Belle, a French ship that sank in Matagorda Bay during La Salle’s doomed expedition to the Americas in the 1680s. Its preserved hull is now on display at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin.
The city of Alexandria has similar plans for its restored merchant ship, Dostal said: “The idea is to reassemble the ship and have it on display on the waterfront.”
For the many Texas A&M students who have assisted with the conservation effort, the project has been a valuable hands-on learning experience. Thanks to them, countless future visitors will get to see this long-forgotten piece of history up close.
“We’ve had about a dozen grad students helping on the project, and at this point probably about a dozen undergraduate students as well,” Dostal said.
With more work ahead for this project and many others, he said the lab will continue enlisting help from this newest generation of Aggie archaeologists.
“If someone wants to get ancient splinters in their thumb,” Dostal said, “we’ll hook them up.”
This story was originally published by Texas A&M Today.
]]>I did not expect a red-headed stranger in an orange VW micro-bus: Jim Jobling, my prospective room-mate, coming to the rescue, to pick me up from the long line of newly shorn cadets at the admissions building. Nor did I expect the NAP buildings to be located 15 miles from campus. My cycling skills improved exponentially, by necessity. I did not expect the comradery among the graduate students or the diversity of our interests and expertise or the noon-time soccer games. I did not expect to learn about archaeobotany from Cheryl Ward or the harborworks of Caesarea from Michael Fitzgerald or drawing ships’ lines from Fred Hocker or *everything* from Cemal Pulak. (We’ve been given a word limit for this or I would mention the dozen other names that leap into my memory, Beth and Eri and Mare and ….). I did get to go to Uluburun: six glorious, challenging summers (Faith, Sheila, Chris, Stephen, Brendan, Jack, Claire, Lillian, Caroline … again the word limit). I learned oodles: about the Late Bronze Age, about diving deep, about keeping records, about building camp, about the several hundred ways okra can be served and Sadık the cook’s one-and-only sublime lentil soup, about being a team member, about initiative, about improvising, about failure. And then the follow-up in the conservation labs, learning with and from the amazing staff (Tuba! Esra, Bilge, Gülser, Güneş…).
Working at Uluburun and earning my M.A. through NAP have been fundamental to shaping my person and career — in terms of academic identity, knowledge, skills, and professional relationships — and privileging me with adventures and memories and friends for a lifetime.
]]>“My time in the NAP (1992–1995) was hugely formative. The faculty at the time–George Bass, Fred van Doorninck, Donny Hamilton, Kevin Crisman, Fred Hocker, and Shelly Wachsman–were all rigorous teachers, demanding academic excellence, honed writing, and polished presentations. The lessons I learned from them, not just about seafaring, ships, and trade, prepared me well for my subsequent academic and professional career. Those were intense, packed years, but they were at the same time immensely gratifying and joyful. The students and staff all worked hard together, played hard, and formed relationships that have lasted for decades.”
]]>]]>Polyvalent meanings behind naval ram displays were prevalent and ingrained in the Roman world, especially at Octavian’s Campsite Memorial for the Actian War. Naval rams and their display alluded to gender and power discourses within Roman society. These discourses included Roman notions of sex, penetration, domination, phallus size, and ideas of achieved hierarchies of masculinity. Analyzing ram displays through Roman perceptions of gender and sexuality, specifically concerning ancient masculinity, reveals that rams functioned not only as weapons of war but also as metaphorical phalloi that embodied and projected immense power.