Shipboard Life aboard Phoenix II: Conserving and Interpreting the Artifacts from Lake Champlain’s Fifth Steamboat

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Shipwrecks and the Public: Getting People Engaged with their Maritime History" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

From 2014 to 2016, researchers from Texas A&M University carried out an investigation of a submerged archaeological site in Lake Champlain, Vermont. The site, Shelburne Shipyard, contained four steamboat wrecks from the nineteenth century. The study of the earliest of these steamboats, Phoenix II, yielded over 200 artifacts diagnostic to aspects of shipboard life needing conservation. This presentation will discuss the conservation of the wood, leather, and ceramic artifacts, as well as research regarding their roles in relation to Phoenix II. The leather and wood have undergone conservation using silica oil, an innovative method developed by the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University. The ceramics were manually and chemically cleaned to reveal their original surfaces. Ongoing research continues to identify the artifacts’ historical significance, which will provide context for their eventual display at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Shipwrecks and the Public: Getting People Engaged with their Maritime History

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 336