Two of the questions most frequently asked by archaeologists of sites
and the objects that populate them are 'How old are you?' and 'Where are
you from?' These questions can often be answered through archaeometric
dating and provenance analyses. As both archaeological sites and
objects, shipwrecks pose a special problem in archaeometric dating and
provenance because when they sailed, they often accumulated new
construction material as timbers were repaired and replaced.
Additionally, during periods of globalization, such as the so-called Age
of Discovery, the provenance of construction materials may not reflect
where the ship was built due to long-distance timber trade networks and
the global nature of these ships' sailing routes. Accepting these
special challenges, nautical archaeologists must piece together the
nuanced relationship between the ship, its timbers, and the shipwreck,
and to do so, wood samples must be removed from the assemblage. Besides
the provenance of the vessel's wooden components, selective removal and
analysis of timber samples can also provide researchers with unique
insights relating to environmental history. For this period, wood
samples could help produce information on the emergent global economy;
networks of timber trade; forestry and carpentry practices; climate
patterns and anomalies; forest reconstruction; repairs made to ships and
when, why, and where those occurred; and much more. This book is a set
of protocols to establish the need for wood samples from shipwrecks and
to guide archaeologists in the removal of samples for a suite of
archaeometric techniques currently available to provenance the timbers
used to construct wooden ships and boats. While these protocols will
prove helpful to archaeologists working on shipwreck assemblages from
any time period and in any place, this book uses Iberian ships of the
16th to 18th centuries as its case studies because their global mobility
poses additional challenges to the problem at hand. At the same time,
their prolificacy and ubiquity make the wreckage of these ships a
uniquely global phenomenon.
