Project SAMPHIRE: Crowd Sourcing Maritime Archaeology data off Scotland's West Coast

ABSTRACT

Perhaps the greatest barrier to effective management of underwater cultural heritage is the lack of data on the nature and location of offshore archaeological resources. This is a problem shared with terrestrial archaeology, but is particularly acute due to the limitations of survey techniques in the underwater environment. In Scotland <15% of known ship losses from the last 200 years have been located and the record is far less comprehensive for earlier periods, verging on a near total data gap. Most known archaeological sites in Scottish waters have been discovered through large-scale sonar survey of relatively low resolution and a considerable bias has been introduced in the archaeological record; this has favored the discovery and documentation of larger and more recent, often upstanding, metal shipwrecks. This article presents the methods and results from a three-year project designed to reduce this bias by demonstrating large-scale prospecting for maritime archaeology through a community-based crowd-sourcing approach. Project SAMPHIRE (the Scottish Atlantic Maritime Past: Heritage, Investigation, Research and Education Project) was geographically focused on the west coast of the Scottish mainland and was undertaken between 2013 and 2015, resulting in a large number of new archaeological discoveries, including shipwrecks, aircraft, and other material of a much more varied nature than what is typically found through large-scale hydrographic surveys.

Keywords:

• Underwater Archaeology
• Community Archaeology
• historic shipwrecks
• archaeological prospection

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was funded by The Crown Estate's Stewardship Fund and was undertaken in partnership between Wessex Archaeology Coastal & Marine (Scotland Office) and the Flinders University of South Australia with support from many other organizations. The authors wish to thank all the community members, clubs, groups, and societies as well as the tireless SAMPHIRE volunteers who contributed to the success of the project and our colleagues at the Scottish Association of Marine Science, the National Facility for Scientific Diving, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (now part of Historic Environment Scotland), and the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats. The authors would like to further acknowledge the various Project Officers at Wessex Archaeology, particularly Andrew Roberts, and the many volunteers who supported this project.

END NOTES

Notes

1. See Canmore, the National Inventory of recorded sites managed by Historic Environment Scotland at http://www.canmore.org.uk (accessed Jan. 16, 2017).

2. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/uk-hydrographic-office (accessed April 9, 2015).

3. https://data.gov.uk/dataset/wrecks-database (accessed April 9, 2015).

4. http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/index/heritage/wrecksites/scotlands-historic-wrecks.htm (accessed April 9, 2015).

5. http://www.promare.co.uk/ships/ (accessed Dec. 6, 2016).

6. http://fipad.org (accessed Dec. 5, 2016).

7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8393952.stm (accessed Dec. 5, 2016).

8. http://www.europeanheritageawards.eu/winners/samphire-maritime-heritage-project-western-scotland/ (accessed May 24, 2017).