The Artifact Collection from Modern Greece: Using 50 Years of Conservation to Answer New Questions

Summary

This paper analyzes the salvage of artifacts from Modern Greece, a Civil War blockade-runner off Wilmington, NC. The NC Underwater Archaeology Branch brought up over 10,000 artifacts in 1962-63. Parts of the collection underwent conservation, while others remained in storage at Fort Fisher. Recently, students from ECU completed a re-housing project to allow for identification of conservation targets and prevent degradation. This paper discusses the retrieval and housing as related to the collection's prospects for archaeological research. Additionally, it covers the challenges and benefits of  this collection for a specific research objective: examining the salvage during the war, in order to identify why soldiers at Fort Fisher chose to save some objects, but not others. This was accomplished by assessing types of value associated with these objects in 1862 to determine whether the objects saved had a higher market value, or a higher use-value value, than those left to sink. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• No Longer Forgotten: Successful Academic Research Drawn from Rehabilitated Collections   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 119