Ballast (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Borrelli. B. Lynn Harris. Melissa Price.

Ships wrecked in Caribbean waters seldom preserve their structural integrity. Often only ferrous artifacts and ballast remain as the cultural indicators. The ballast of a wreck, if carefully documented, may have significant interpretive value to the site. An East Carolina University team investigated a wreck site in Costa Rica consisting of yellow brick stacked in a concentrated, organized pile.  This paper examines the function of brick as both ballast and cargo in the historical record of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey R Delsescaux. Piotr T Bojakowski.

For the past three years, archaeologists have been carefully excavating the remains of the early 17th-Century English vessel Warwick on the bottom of Castle Harbor, Bermuda.  Although the wreck was partially salvaged in the 1970’s, leaving much of the ballast rocks scattered around the site and unrecorded, there was a small portion of ballast found intact during the 2011 field season. This intact section yielded some interesting artifacts and allowed for better insights into 17th-Century...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Langley. Raymond L Hayes. Laszlo Takacs. Marina Congedo.

On the East Coast of North America, nodules of flint often are encountered in ballast piles.  Many archaeologists assert an ability to identify visually when these are of European origin. While, anecdotally, this appears to be generally true, most archaeologists cannot articulate the specific factors they employ in making the identification.  This project, which builds on Barbara Luedtke’s 1992 work, examines geological terminology, tests the visual identification assertion, and employs XRF and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean H Reid. Stephen Lubkemann.

In this paper we will analyze the documented ballast of the BISC-2 site focusing on three primary—and interlinked-- questions: 1-the archaeological evidence that this was a case of ballast as cargo; 2-the mounting empirical evidence that suggests that these bricks may be "ladrillos" –a form manufactured in Spanish (rather than British)North America; 3-and the potential implications of finding this type of likely less documented  cargo on a ship that was clearly carrying a large cargo of English...