The advent of steam contributed heavily to the economic transformation of early America, facilitating trade through the transportation of goods along the country’s lakes, rivers, and canals. Serious experimentation with steam navigation began in the last quarter of the 18th century. By the turn of the 19th century, fledgling US steamboat companies vied for control of navigation rights in the country’s northern waterways. The second steamboat to be launched on Lake Champlain, Phoenix, operated as a passenger steamer between 1815 and 1819, when she caught fire and sank in the lake. The intention of this study is to advance our knowledge of early steamboat design and use in the United States through the archaeological investigation of the country’s earliest-known steamboat wreck. As little is known about the development of these early steam vessels, the study of Phoenix offers a unique opportunity to gain new information related to steamboat design in the early 19th century as well as a glimpse into life on the lakes and rivers of North America during this era. The dissertation presents detailed information on Phoenix’s construction, operation, and sinking based on historical and archaeological analysis and interpretation. In combination with the available archival record and analytical comparisons with steamboats of similar size and age, a more comprehensive understanding of the developmental phases of steam travel and its impact on early America can be gained.

Arbetet handlar om sjömätning, både hur det går till i dag och hur det gick till förr. Jag har också forskat i alternativa metoder som skulle kunna komplettera konventionell sjömätning. Syftet med mitt arbete var att ta reda på hur många oupptäckta grund det finns kvar i den Svenska skärgården. Metoden för att få fram bra och trovärdiga uppgifter har varit att intervjua personer som på ett eller annat sätt sysslar med sjömätning. För att kunna beskriva sjömätningens historia har jag tagit hjälp av litteratur. Resultatet av min undersökning är att sjökortet i huvudsak stämmer någorlunda med verkligheten. Det finns dock vissa undantag, ofta stämmer sjökortet sämre i skärgårdar där få yrkesfartyg opererar. / This essay is about hydrography, I will investigate how it is done, both today and from a historic perspective. I have also done some research in alternative methods that may complete conventional hydrography. The purpose with this essay was to investigate how many unknown dangerous shoals there is left in the Swedish archipelago. The method to receive good and trustworthy information has been to do some interviews to people that in one way or another are practising hydrography. To be able to describe the history of hydrography I have had some literature as an aid. The result of my investigation is that the nautical chart is mainly comparable to the reality; however, there are some exceptions. The nautical charts is often less reliable in archipelagos were professional shipping is unusual.

During the fall of 1973, the newly formed (American) Institute of Nautical Archaeology conducted its first systematic underwater survey of the southwestern coast of Turkey with the goal of locating the first shipwreck to be subsequently excavated by the Institute. Of the 18 wreck sites identified during the survey, a site off Sheytan Deresi (Devil’s Creek) proved to be the one that attracted George Bass, director of the survey, as most meriting further study. During the excavation that followed in September and October 1975, the site produced a number of complete and fragmentary ceramic vessels that formed the main artifact assemblage. Although the ceramic vessels brought to light at Sheytan Deresi have been studied by George Bass, Roxani Margariti and others since the 1975 excavation, locating precise parallels for the assemblage proved a difficult task and resulted in a less than full understanding of the site. The following thesis represents a renewed effort to answer a number of questions still surrounding the Sheytan Deresi site. In addition to expanding the extensive search for parallels undertaken by Bass and Margariti, recent research has involved a number of scientific analyses, including petrographic analysis of the ceramic assemblage, luminescence dating of ceramic fragments, and elemental examination of the fabric through neutron activation analysis and energy dispersive spectroscopy. The use of three-dimensional modeling has been adopted for the purposes of site interpretation. Although the impact of this more holistic approach cannot be entirely foreseen at this time, a number of interesting hypotheses regarding the site can now be suggested. It appears that the ceramic assemblage, which is now conclusively of a single origin, may be of a specialized maritime nature, and likely belongs to the Middle Bronze Age, reminiscent of, but entirely similar to, regional types of Anatolian and Cretan vessels. These tentative conclusions, as well as an examination of the site itself, suggest that the (Minoanizing) ceramic assemblage of Sheytan Deresi stood witness to a fairly small Middle Bronze Age coastal trading vessel that capsized rounding a dangerous cape, not far from its point of origin. We are still not in a position to fully comprehend the wrecking event that took place at Sheytan Deresi, but we are now firmly on course towards reaching that objective.

Throughout the ages, countless shipwrecks have left behind a rich historical and technological legacy. In this context, nautical archaeologists study the remains of these boats and ships and the cultures that created and used them. Ship reconstruction can be seen as an incomplete jigsaw reconstruction problem. Therefore, I hypothesize that a computational approach based on digital libraries can enhance the reconstruction of a composite object (ship) from fragmented, incomplete, and damaged pieces (timbers and ship remains). This dissertation describes a framework for enabling the integration of textual and visual information pertaining to wooden vessels from sources in multiple languages. Linking related pieces of information relies on query expansion and improving relevance. This is accomplished with the implementation of an algorithm that derives relationships from terms in a specialized glossary, combining them with properties and concepts expressed in an ontology. The main archaeological sources used in this dissertation are data generated from a 17th-century Portuguese ship, the Pepper Wreck, complemented with information obtained from other documented and studied shipwrecks. Shipbuilding treatises spanning from the late 16th- to the 19th-centuries provide textual sources along with various illustrations. Additional visual materials come from a repository of photographs and drawings documenting numerous underwater excavations and surveys. The ontology is based on a rich database of archaeological information compiled by Mr. Richard Steffy. The original database was analyzed and transformed into an ontological representation in RDF-OWL. Its creation followed an iterative methodology which included numerous revisions by nautical archaeologists. Although this ontology does not pretend to be a final version, it provides a robust conceptualization. The proposed approach is evaluated by measuring the usefulness of the glossary and the ontology. Evaluation results show improvements in query expansion across languages based on Blind Relevance Feedback using the glossary as query expansion collection. Similarly, contextualization was also improved by using the ontology for categorizing query results. These results suggest that related external sources can be exploited to better contextualize information in a particular domain. Given the characteristics of the materials in nautical archaeology, the framework proposed in this dissertation can be adapted and extended to other domains.

Nautical archaeology has made remarkable advances since its inception half a century ago, but one area in need of more attention is the examination of cultural aspects of seafaring. This dissertation advances understanding of eighteenth- through early-twentieth century British and American maritime culture by exploring traditional memorialization practices. Interpretations are based primarily on analysis of 412 maritime memorials recorded during two archaeological surveys in Great Britain and the United States. In addition, primary accounts from the Age of Sail are utilized to place maritime memorialization into its proper cultural and historical context. Research reveals three major themes in Anglo-American maritime memorialization. First, memorials show a striking concern for the dangers and hardships of life at sea. Numerous memorials describe the perils of the natural world and the group values that mariners developed to cope with the ever-present possibility of sudden death. Such values include attention to duty, courage, group loyalty, self-sacrifice, and pride. Second, maritime communities faced the problem of commemorating those who never returned from the sea. Many sailors were lost at sea or died aboard ship or in distant lands. In the vast majority of such cases, the body was never returned home, and many did not receive proper burial. As a result, family members and fellow sailors created memorials to honor the lost and to symbolically lay the deceased to rest. Evidence indicates, however, that such attempts were not entirely satisfactory. Many epitaphs lament the fact that empty graves cannot provide an adequate substitute for missing bodies. Finally, investigation revealed a significant increase in religious sentiment on maritime memorials from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Age of Sail. It is suggested that the increase in maritime religious sentiment was linked to nineteenth-century religious reform movements. The prevalence of religious imagery and inscriptions on maritime memorials during this time, however, probably does not indicate that most sailors became religious. Rather, most religious maritime memorials were erected by sailors' families. This suggests that maritime families turned to religion as a source of comfort when faced with the deaths of loved ones at sea.

Past research on eighteenth-century ships has primarily taken one of two avenues, either focusing on naval warship construction or examining the merchant shipping industry as a whole in terms of trends and economics. While these areas are important to pursue, comparatively little is known about actual construction techniques used on the ordinary merchant vessels of the period. Most modern sources emphasize hull design and lines drawings; contemporary sources take a similar direction, explaining the theory of ship design but often leaving out how to put the ship together. In recent years, however, new information has come to light through archaeological excavations regarding Anglo-American merchant ship construction. In this study, several of these shipwrecks were examined in light of economic factors and the literary evidence from the period in an attempt to gain a better understanding of colonial American merchant ship construction in the eighteenth century. While the data set was not large enough to make conclusive statements, this type of comparative analysis should begin to establish a framework for the interpretation of future shipwreck excavations.

On trouve sur les côtes de l’estuaire du Saint-Laurent des vestiges de quai dont la ressemblance mutuelle suggère leur contemporanéité. Les vestiges de ces «quais du gouvernement » relatent une importante conjoncture (1870-1930) caractérisée par l'intégration des localités côtières dans une économie interrégionale. Le quai, autrefois lieu d'interface entre la ruralité et le cabotage, devient pour l'archéologue une occasion de retracer les éléments entrant dans sa conception et sa réalisation. L’observation des éléments architecturaux permet de distinguer les traits architecturaux associés aux quais du gouvernement parmi l’ensemble des techniques de construction déjà employées dans l’estuaire au XIXe siècle. / In the St. Lawrence estuary, there are many ancient wharves whose mutual resemblance of their remains suggests they are contemporaneous. The remains of the “government wharves” relate an important conjecture (1870-1930) formed by the integration of the coastal localities in an interregional economic network. The wharf, formerly an interface between the rural land and the estuarial cabotage, presents an opportunity for the archaeologist to recognize the architectural character of the conception and the realization of the wharves. The examination of their frame construction allows us to distinguish the architectural character of the government wharves among the techniques already employed in the estuary in the 19th century.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Historic Maps & Chart Project ... supplied the majority of the digital images used"--P. vi. Col. ill. on folded leaves. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-199). Also available online via the NOAA website as PDF file, viewed 11/28/08: <http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/noaa_documents/NOAA_related_docs/McConnel_USCGS_Charts_Thesis.pdf >

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1996. / Title from title page screen, viewed May 18, 2006. Dissertation Committee: John R. McCarthy (chair), Larry D. Kennedy, Marcia D. Escott, Lemuel W. Watson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-81) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Title from title screen (viewed on Oct. 15, 2007). "June 2007." Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-199).