Photo credit: Misc.
The Discovery Channel could have a field day with these recent events. Archaeologists found one-third of a 50-foot vessel at the Indigo Hotel construction site at 220 S. Union Street in Alexandria, Virginia. Thought to be from the late eighteenth century and used as a landfill that stretched along the Potomac River, archaeologists are using 3-D laser scanning equipment to record the well-preserved hull. The discovery may represent a type of vessel that has not yet been documented through archaeological research.
Photo credit: Visit Alexandria
Elsewhere, in an odd twist to global warming, remains of an 1800’s whaling fleet was discovered off Alaska’s Arctic coast. Not your typical lost and found, but with less ice in the Arctic as a result of climate change, archaeologists now have more access to potential shipwreck sites than ever before.
In September, a team of archaeologists from the Maritime Heritage Program of NOAA searched a 30-mile stretch of coastline in the waters of the Chukchi Sea, near Wainwright, Alaska. Previous searches for the ships had found traces of gear salvaged from the wrecks as well as scattered timbers stranded high on the isolated beaches that stretch from Wainwright to Point Franklin. “We are searching for what remains of this lost whaling fleet. We are comprehensively mapping this graveyard of whaling heritage, an area of great significance in the global whaling heritage landscape, documenting what remains of the scattered remnants of these ships,” said a spokesperson from NOAA.
Abandonment of the whalers in the Arctic Ocean, September 1871. Scanned from the original Harper’s Weekly 1871, courtesy of Robert Schwemmer Maritime Library.
So why are we telling you about these finds? No reason really other than we are fascinated by what lies beneath us and we remember the toxic discovery on the ground of American University and other sites around Spring Valley – nearly 100 years after the Army buried chemical weapons there. Just sayin’. Nothing like discovering the ‘ghosts of the past.’ Oh, and it’s a slow news day…..there’s that.
