So…what was a late 15th-century English coin doing in the ruins of an early 17th-century English settlement in Newfoundland?

An example of a half-groat silver coin, minted at Canterbury during the reign of Henry VII from 1493 to 1499. By The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54926198 There's been a bit of archaeological buzz over the recently announced discovery of probably the oldest English coin ever found...

A summer of wreck-hunting in review

My 2021 boating season may have been shortened by covid-19 (restrictions meant my boat wasn't in the water until mid-June), but I managed some interesting, novel diversions, in looking for shipwrecks on Georgian Bay.

The Norse beat the Portuguese to the Azores by seven centuries

The Azores group, in Google Maps. The article's authors say the discoveries of "fecal biomarkers" in lake sediments at Corvo in the northwest around 850 CE and Pico in the central group around 700 CE, given chronological uncertainties, indicate that colonization across the archipelago at an early medieval date was "near simultaneous." PNAS (Proceedings of...

Researching and writing in a post-pandemic world

I emailed a professor emeritus and independent researcher this morning, to let him know the project for which he had provided assistance in sources, Jackson's Wars, was approaching publication (Spring 2022). I had to look up our last email conversation to get his address, and I realized that we had not conversed since August 2019....

The remarkable Gribshunden find: a 1495 shipwreck revolutionizing our understanding of a critical age of sail

A detail of the Gribshunden wreck, fig. 12 in the 2021 archaeologists' report. Smithsonian Magazine this month has a feature article on the most recent underwater archaeology performed on the Gribshunden (Greyhound), a heavily-armed flagship of King Hans of Denmark that caught fire, exploded, and sank on the coast of Sweden in 1495. Despite the...

“Wreckwatch”

Like history? Marine archaeology? And every point in between? Thanks to a citation in a recent article in the Guardian, I discovered this quarterly magazine, Wreckwatch. Produced in Britain, it's written by actual marine archaeologists and historians, is very readable, roams the globe in content, and is full of nerd-out imagery. Even better: it's free....