2 - Broken Ship, Dead Ship

Summary

Abstract

While we think of ships as transporters and connectors, once they break, they become forgotten rejectamenta, removed from the human-social sphere. And yet archaeologists go to great lengths to reinstate their ‘authentic’ sociocultural statuses. This chapter identifies the longstanding metaphorical connections between ships and bodies and the religious associations of bodily failure and fragmentation as the driving forces behind archaeological resurrection. Because the Western academic tradition has developed alongside Early Modern Christian theology, and because archaeology developed out of its defense, there appear to be latent theological motivations behind the ways that nautical archaeologists approach wreckage, especially when located underwater. The sixteenth-century Yarmouth Roads Protected Wreck, of presumed Spanish origin located in English waters, helps flesh out arguments against exhumation.

Keywords: maritime archaeology; speculative realism; nautical archaeology; strange mereology; Yarmouth Roads shipwreck

And your whole will, your eternal recurrence, are these anything more than the dream of one who neither wants to have been born, nor to continue being born, at every instant, of a female other? Does your joy in becoming not result from annihilating her from whom you are tearing yourself away? Eternal is the joy that carries within it the joy of annihilation, the affirmation of destruction.

Shipwrecks are often understood, even by specialists who excavate them, as little more than dead ships. They are things to salvage, scraping from the seabed the artifacts worth studying or selling. Salvage operations might be likened to underwater grave robbing, and indeed, academic archaeologists often do draw this comparison. By contrast, archaeologists see their own positions as less salvor and more savior. That is, nautical archaeologists practice a kind of resurrection, returning the shipwreck to the elevated status of the ship. This practice, whether achieved through a literal ‘raising’ of the ship or by way of the virtual resurrection, assumes that the wrecked ship's rightful place is among the living—that is, living humans. Both forms of academic resurrection work on the human savior's assumption that the shipwreck was in need of intervention to begin with, or that its sheer existence is somehow incomplete as is. In other words, a ship is dead when it ceases to serve human needs, but life can be reinstated by granting it a new form and function as tourist attraction, public outreach initiative, cultural heritage token, or research subject. Ostensibly, humans have the power to build ships, sink them, and resurrect them, asserting absolute control over these objects’ destinies.