"Guns and ships, and so the balance shifts":A Material Culture Analysis of Betsy and the British Naval Strategy of Scuttling during the Battle of Yorktown, 1781

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "The World Turned Upside Down: Revisiting the Archaeology of the American Revolution" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

By the time General Charles Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, the majority of his coveted shipping fleet laid abandoned at the bottom of the York River. In 1978, the Yorktown Shipwreck Archaeological Project was launched with the intention of surveying several of these wrecks, including a full excavation of Betsy, a chartered victualler scuttled during the siege of Yorktown to protect the town from an American amphibious assault. Revisiting the material culture collected during the excavation, this paper strives to combine historical research and archaeological analysis to determine the value of materials during the final days of one of Great Britain’s foundational overseas conflicts. With Great Britain at the brink of establishing its global empire, this material culture analytical framework could set a precedent in understanding British material value during overseas conflicts at the turn of the 19th century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The World Turned Upside Down: Revisiting the Archaeology of the American Revolution   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology