Seeing the Unseen: The feasibility of Using Side Scan Sonar on the War Eagle Shipwreck Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Maritime Transportation, History, and War in the 19th-Century Americas" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The sidewheel steamship War Eagle was well known for her transport along the Mississippi, involvement in the civil war, and flaming loss on the Black River in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The location of the shipwreck has been known and visited since the time of her loss, yet the river’s current and "diving through mud" visibility prevented any reports from describing what the site actually looks like. Wisconsin Historical Society Archaeologists were interested in the feasibility of using side scan sonar on such unfavorable sites and tested the technology in hopes of seeing a shipwreck that had not been seen in almost 150 years. This paper discusses using side scan sonar technology to capture the first image of the War Eagle site and the future of using this technology to investigate other black water sites in Wisconsin’s inland waterways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Maritime Transportation, History, and War in the 19th-Century Americas

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 167