Clovis Comet Debate - The Archaeological Conservancy

Ship Found At
In theNEWS
World Trade Center
Eighteenth-century merchant vessel
discovered during construction project.
tury merchant ship unearthed
this July during construction
at the World Trade Center site in New
York City may shed new light on what
life was like aboard merchant vessels,
where they traveled, and how they
were constructed. Very little is now
known about these ships, said Diane
Dallal, director of archaeology at AKRF,
the firm monitoring the construction
site. “They were considered mundane,
and the building techniques weren’t
documented,” she said. “It’s a once-in-alifetime
discovery.”
The ship was found about 30
feet below street level in landfill that
extended the lower shoreline of Man-
hattan Island into the Hudson River.
Dallal said only one other ship, the
Ronson, has been archaeologically
excavated from a landfill in New York
City. The ship is thought to date to
sometime in the 1700s because the
area it was found in was filled in during
the late 1790s. If it was sunk intentionally
for landfill, then it would probably
have been a derelict, said Molly McDonald,
an AKRF archaeologist. It’s also possible
that it sank there before the area
was filled. Dendrochronology, a science
that uses tree rings to identify the age of
wood, will be used to determine more
precisely when the ship was built.
McDonald first spotted the ship
when a backhoe dug up a curved piece
of timber. “It was clearly different than
other timbers that were being dug up.
akrf The discovery of an 18th-cen-
Researchers examine the remains of the wooden ship that
appears to have been about 60 feet long.
It looked like a ship, so we immediately
stopped the backhoe,” she said. Then a
team of AKRF archaeologists carefully
excavated the mucky area with shovels
and trowels. They unearthed about
32 feet of what appears to have been
a 60-foot wooden ship. They hope to
unearth the other half when construction
begins on an adjacent area.
The team retrieved the outer
frame of the boat, the ceiling planks
for the top of the hull deck, and the
orlop deck—a small platform near the
bottom of the hull. They also found
treenails, bricks, buttons, shoe buckles,
rope, a couple of complete leather
shoes, dozens of leather shoe parts, and
ceramics. A portion of what may have
been a swivel gun, cannon balls, and a
musket ball were also discovered. “Most
merchant vessels were armed because
of the threat from pirates, Dallal said.
The remains of marine organisms
in the timbers will be studied and may
provide clues about where the ship
sailed. For example, worms that bored
holes into the timbers can be identified
by the carcasses they left behind.
If Toredo worms, which live only in
the Caribbean, were present, that will
identify at least one of the ship’s destinations.
—Paula Neely
american archaeology 7