archaeologists could work with excellent visibility by building a coffer dam around another of Cornwallis’s scuttled ships and filtering the water inside.

These spectacular tours de force did not mean that controlled excavations at lesser depths did not continue. In Red Bay, Labrador, Robert Grenier of Parks Canada directed the excavation, between 1980 and 1984, of the sixteenth-century Basque whaler San Juan and several small boats, including one of the ship’s whaleboats, probably the oldest and best specimen of an early boat used to hunt whales. To the south, Kevin Crisman and Arthur Cohen created a specialty of studying ships sunk during the War of 1812 in Lake Ontario and in Lake Champlain for the Champlain Maritime Society and the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation.

Anders Franzén returned to nautical archaeology in 1980 with the discovery of another well-preserved seventeenth-century Swedish warship, the Kronan. The Mary Rose, carefully excavated under the direction of Margaret Rule since 1979, was finally raised in 1982 but must undergo decades of chemical conservation before the remains of the hull are fully restored for public viewing. In the meantime, a stunning array of artifacts, including rare examples of English longbows, have already been conserved and are on display in Portsmouth, England; many have also been shown around the world in a traveling exhibit.

The most careful underwater excavation in the Caribbean was begun in 1982 when Donald H. Keith of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology undertook the excavation and conservation of what was then the oldest wreck known in the New World, presumably a Spanish vessel of the early fifteenth century, at Molasses Reef in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Keith explored other fifteenth-century wrecks in the Caribbean for INA before forming his own group, Ships of Discovery, which has established a museum for the Molasses Reef wreck on Grand Turk Island.

Also in 1982, Mensun Bound of MARE at Oxford University excavated a probable Etruscan wreck of around 600 b.c. at Giglio, an island off the southwestern coast of Tuscany in central Italy. In Turkey, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, in a project that continued from 1983 into the 1990s, surveyed and excavated a fourteenth-century b.c. wreck that has produced fifteen tons of raw goods. These include the oldest known tin ingots, glass ingots, a wooden writing tablet, ebony logs, a fragmentary seagoing hull, ten tons of copper ingots, a unique gold scarab that once belonged to Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti, and pottery, seals, jewelry, and stone objects from half a dozen ancient civilizations. Twenty-four stone anchors were carried in the fifteen-meter hull made of fir planks fastened with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints. Lying between forty-four and sixty-one meters deep off Uluburun, near Ka in Turkey, it is the deepest site yet excavated by scuba divers.

Israeli archaeologists and divers had long been finding and mapping artifacts from the Bronze Age onward in the Mediterranean, including the bronze ram of a Hellenistic warship off Atlit on the coast of israel. A severe drought in 1985 lowered the level of the Sea of Galilee sufficiently to expose a fishing boat from the time of Christ. It was removed for conservation and study in early 1986 by Shelley Wachsmann.

In Egypt, a covered pit next to the great pyramid of Cheops was opened to reveal a second dismantled boat. And in 1987, the Abandoned Shipwreck Act, which was signed into law in the United States, removed historic shipwrecks in states’ waters from the jurisdiction of admiralty salvage law.

1990s

By the last decade of the twentieth century, nautical archaeology had become a respected subdiscipline of archaeology, and there were graduate programs devoted to training future specialists at St. Andrews University in Scotland; Texas A&M University, with which INA affiliated in 1976; East Carolina University in North Carolina, studying not only local wrecks but wrecks in Bermuda; Haifa University in Israel; the University of Copenhagen; and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Courses in nautical archaeology were also being offered from Australia to Oxford to the University of Texas.

Proceedings of conferences and journals devoted to the field have become commonplace.