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A vinegar bottle from the 'Mardi Gras Shipwreck' is lifted out of a water bath at A&M's Riverside Campus. The bottle is in the bath to remove salt from the cells of the glass and reacquaint it with life on the surface. If dried out normally, the bottle would break.
Helen Dewolf, chief conservator for the 'Mardi Gras Shipwreck,' examines a cannon ball from the wreck. She explained that the sea leeched some of the iron out of the relic, leaving an object that weighs far less than it should. What is left of the cannon ball is mostly graphite.
Into the deep
Shipwrecked artifacts resurfaced for conservation
By: Kristin Leveille
Posted: 6/28/07
Four thousand feet beneath Gulf Coast waters, buried under sediment and worn with time, lies a relic of the past: a 200-year-old ship with a mysterious identity and artifacts that have recently been excavated by a team of Texas A&M researchers.
The excavation of this vessel, called the "Mardi Gras Shipwreck" because of its proximity to the Mardi Gras Gas pipeline, is the deepest archaeological excavation attempted in the Gulf of Mexico.
Researchers from A&M's Department of Oceanography and Center for Maritime Archeology, along with members from the Minerals Management Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of the Interior, collaborated on the two-year-long project, which culminated in a trip on May 22 to the shipwreck site, located 45 miles from the Louisiana Coast.
The Okeanos Gas Gathering Company that funded the project, awarded A&M $4.8 million to spend on fieldwork, conservation, education outreach and other materials needed to successfully complete the excavation.
William Bryant, a professor of oceanography, was one of the principal investigators on the project. Bryant has been engaged in Gulf research for the past 40 years and has worked in almost every ocean in the world.
"We knew about the shipwreck from other sources, but we went in and drew up a proposal for British Petroleum [a member of Okeanos]," Bryant said. "They knew A&M was competent, could do the job and we also have the world's best nautical archeological program."
Bryant said the team finished the expedition in record time. "At this depth, it was an extremely laborious expedition, one that had never been done before," Bryant said. "We had an excellent ship, excellent equipment and an excellent crew."
Preparation for the fieldwork portion of the project began in July 2006, said Peter Hitchcock, an oceanography doctoral student and project manager for the A&M team.
"There were several different occasions when people from the mineral management service or Okeanos videotaped the site, so we knew what we were going to see as far as surface artifacts before we left," Hitchcock said. "Our primary goal was to recover the surface artifacts, but that usually leads to identifying the vessel."
Hitchcock said that based on the preliminary video footage, the team estimated the ship dates from the late 1700s to early 1800s, but through the retrieval and analysis of artifacts they narrowed down the year to 1810.
In order to retrieve items, the team worked with Veolia Environmental, who leased remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to A&M. Hitchcock said the uniqueness of this excavation comes from its location in the deep sea, and because of the 4,000 foot depth, equipment such as the ROVs were required.
"We put navigational beacons on the seafloor in order to translate the position of the ROV into real world coordinates," he said. "We then took the ROV and flew it over the site so it could take digital still images of the shipwreck that we then pieced together to get a site map."
Hitchcock said although the team prepared for possible scenarios, they had to be flexible enough to change plans to fit the on-site situation.
"What we had was a lot of complex technology that we were trying to integrate," Hitchcock said. "There are always complexities, and this is what makes doing a project with ROVs so difficult."
Any setbacks they encountered, however, did not deter the team from collecting the visible artifacts from the seafloor, including a corroded cannon that had to be brought to the surface using straps, since any other method of excavation would have damaged the hull of the ship.
The team returned from the fieldwork portion of the project on June 17 with thousands of artifacts, including stoneware jugs, navigation equipment, an extremely rare cast-iron stove, hourglasses and condiment bottles. The work involved with preserving and maintaining those artifacts will continue at A&M's Conservation Research Lab until the pieces are ready for display in the Louisiana State Museum.
"People have a tendency to forget that really all the work comes after the fieldwork," Hitchcock said. "The historical research of the artifacts and the conservation is what's really important. We want to try to bring this information to the public."
Helen Dewolf, chief conservator at the A&M Conservation Research Laboratory, founded in 1978, said sometimes the most delicate and interesting pieces come from the lab work, when the nuances of the story they are trying to uncover come into focus.
Dewolf said unlike the fieldwork, which is under time and budget restraints, the conservation part of the project can take years to complete, and despite the team's best efforts, some pieces don't survive the process.
"Our job is to get the items unused to the environment they have been in for so long and eventually put them in a museum," Dewolf said. "For the 'Mardi Gras Shipwreck,' some items will take just weeks to conserve, but others, like the cannon, may take a year."
Dewolf said the frugality of an artifact often dictates how conservators handle it. "Conservation takes time, and it can be intellectually challenging trying to figure out which element, if we can't take a piece apart, should be conserved first," Dewolf said. "Then we have to plan our strategy and still make as many people happy who wanted the items in the museum yesterday."
Another dimension of the conservationist's job is to put all of the recovered items into context. Helen said the search for the identity of the "Mardi Gras Shipwreck" remains a mystery, but that the artifacts they find within a large concretion should tell them much more.
"She could have been a war vessel, a merchant ship in hostile waters or some sort of gunrunner, but we just don't know yet - that is half the fun, knowing there will always be that hint of mystery," Dewolf said. "Archeology isn't just digging in the soil or digging underwater, it is also digging in a library or LibCat for the information, and if you are lucky, you get a name, if not, its still a mystery but that's OK too."
The team will publish their findings at the end of the year.
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