Abstract
The Gulf of Mexico emerged as an American maritime frontier in the nineteenth century. Maritime activities expanded and matured in terms of technology, scope, and scale. The commerce of an emerging nation left a substantial archaeological record on the seabed in the Gulf and on the ocean highway heading out of the Gulf and to the southern Atlantic coast of the United States as well as into Central and South American and Caribbean ports. Sailing vessels continued to work in these trades throughout the century, in their last iterations as bulk carriers and in some cases as cut-down barges. Two deep-water shipwrecks offer archaeologically well-preserved, essentially undisturbed opportunities to assess former sailing vessels engaged in the bulk commodities trades of the Gulf in the last part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century. The wrecks dubbed the “Ewing Bank Wreck” and the “Vernon Basin 2109 Wreck” are former wooden sailing ships converted to barges carrying bulk commodities that were lost pursuing that trade. These wrecks reflect not only the rise of new bulk commodities trades in the Gulf, but also the inherent processes of repurposing ships at the end of their working lives.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the original teams that led the work on these wrecks our colleagues from BOEM, C&C Technologies, U.S. Geological Survey, Naval Research Laboratory, and NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration, the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP), and the various team members from various agencies who participated as “doctors on call” for the telepresence mission to the Vernon Basin 2109 Wreck, as well as colleagues who assisted with the on-site analysis, assessment and analysis of Ewing Bank Wreck from the first assessments during Lophelia II in 2009 through the 2017 SCHEMA study from C&C Technologies, The PAST Foundation, the University of Southern Mississippi, BOEM, BSEE. We also thank geologist Will Doar for his reanalysis of the stone from the Ewing Bank Wreck. We are particularly grateful to the team at BOEM, especially Scott Sorset, Doug Jones, Brian Jordan, Chris Horrell, and Melanie Damour, and now-retired friend and colleague Jack Irion. The reanalysis we did on the Ewing Bank Wreck was completed as part of a BOEM-funded study of nineteenth-century shipwrecks in the Gulf, and is drawn from an historical context study and National Register of Historic Places nominations for that wreck.
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Delgado, J.P., Brennan, M.L., Church, R.A. et al. Late Nineteenth-Century Bulk Trade and Barges: An Historical Overview and the Likely Context of Two Deep-Water Shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. J Mari Arch 18, 591–645 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-023-09369-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-023-09369-0