Introduction

The study of maritime archaeology is a relatively new activity in Northern Ireland. This paper introduces the approach that has been adopted in investigating the maritime cultural landscape and takes a detailed look at the maritime archaeology of Strangford Lough.

Only in the last decade has government in Northern Ireland been responsible for the management of maritime archaeology. The Department of the Environment agency, Environment and Heritage Service (EHS), administers the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 in Northern Ireland's territorial waters. Having no knowledge of the subject and faced with the management of shipwrecks, EHS Grst created a register of known shipwrecks. A Senior Fellow, Colin Breen, was appointed in 1993 in the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's University Belfast. Using docurnentary sourc:es such as Lloyd's List and Lloyd's Register, together with Parlianientary Sessional papers and many other documentary sources, he identified some 3000 wrecks around Northern Ireland’s short coastline (Breen 1996).

The publication of this map is an event of importance. It is no exaggeration to say that it marks a definite advance in the geographical study of history, There may be other historical maps of a like completeness and accuracy, but if there be, ‘ this deponent knoweth them not ’. It is for this reason that a contribution to local history is deemed to deserve an extended notice in the pages of ANTIQUITY. The map is the result of nearly twenty years of research. The results of that research might have been presented to the public in the form of a bulky volume ; it is an event without precedent that they should appear in the form of a map.

The survival of organicmaterials in the waterless fringes of the Takla Makan and Lop Deserts in the Tarim basin in Xinjiang (north-western China) has fascinated us for a century, since Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Albert von Le Coq found the remains of settlements and cemeteries at the Great Wall's lonely outposts and along the routes between China and Central Asia known as the Silk Road. The finds date from the Bronze Age to the later firstmillennium AD. In the 1980s and '90s, it was shown that the most striking of them, the Tarim 'mummies', belong to both Mongoloid and Caucasoid peoples (Mallory&Mair 2000). The archaeology here of public and domestic life is full of the kinds of surprises and contradictions that we are learning to expect—if not accept—with 'globalisation'. Development in the region is now prompting new discoveries but also looters, so the research is urgent.

Last summer an archaeologist, Mr R. J. C. Atkinson, taking photographs at Stonehenge, made a most remarkable discovery. He was preparing to photograph a name carved on the inward-facing (northwest) face of Stone 53, one of the Great Horseshoe Trilithons; for this purpose he had remained there after 5 o’clock on July 10th, waiting for the sun to move round and shine on it. Looking not directly at the stone itself but at the image on the glass of his reflex camera, he suddenly saw the dark outline of what appeared to be a dagger, and beside it that of an axe. The carvings were deeply cut and the edges smoothened by the erosive action of more than thirty centuries of British weather (PLATE I). Closer inspection revealed several more axes and some other markings, all probably artificial but now too much weathered for decipherment. Two days later a ten-year-old schoolboy, David Booth, found an axe on the outer face of Stone 4, one of the stones of the Outer Circle, and subsequent search revealed ten more axes on the same face (PLATES II, VI A). Later still, while engaged in making casts of the axes already discovered, Mr R. S. Newall has found many more, bringing the total for Stone 53 up to 12 and for Stone 4 to 25, including on the latter one exceptionally large axe measuring 14 inches in length and 10½ inches across the splayed cutting edge. He has also verified three axes like the others near the bottom left-hand corner of the outer face of Stone 3 (PLATE III B).

That a system of writing had been in use in the Mycenaean civilisation on the mainland of Greece had been known ever since the then existing evidence was collected by Tsountas and Manatt in The Mycenaean Age, published in 1897. Further evidence thereafter slowly accumulated. An inscribed stirrup jar was found at Orchomenos in 1903. In subsequent years others were discovered at Tiryns, Thebes, and Eleusis; but in the fourth volume of The Palace of Minos, published in 1935, Sir Arthur Evans could only say as regards the Greek mainland ‘ the absence of clay tablets should be rather set down to the accidents of discovery or to climatic causes ’. Four years later in 1939 Professor Blegen found in the newly discovered Palace of Nestor at Pylos an archive room with several hundred inscribed clay tablets. This number he has further increased in his resumed excavations in 1952. In recording the discovery of the House of the Oil Merchant at Mycenae in 1950 I ventured to prophesy that if the excavation of that house could be completed it was quite likely that inscribed clay tablets would be found in its ruins. In the complete excavation of that house at Mycenae in the summer of 1952 the prophecy was fulfilled and thirty-eight clay tablets were found in two of its rooms. This is a discovery of the first importance; in conjunction with the tablets from Pylos it shows that we must expect to find inscribed clay tablets in any Mycenaean palace or large private house on the Greek mainland. There must have been tablets in the palace at Mycenae but that site was badly damaged by later building above it and subsequent denudation. At Tiryns too there must have been tablets, but that site like the Mycenae palace was excavated in the 1880’s when archaeologists were not so alive to the possibilities of what might be found. A clay tablet in the earth or even just out of the earth is barely recognizable as such. Consequently the excavator himself must have a good eye for such things and train his workmen to observe and preserve even the most insignificant looking objects of clay. It is probably too late now to find tablets at Tiryns, but some presumably must still lurk in the ruins of the palace at Thebes if that site can ever be fully excavated. The Acropolis of Athens with the palace of Erechtheus presumably once had tablets, but the classical buildings and the excavations of the last century there have destroyed any hope of their survival.

The connexion between Maps and Archaeology is of a very obvious and straightforward nature. All distributional problems must, for instance, be studied on maps. If we want to find out about the distribution of the beaker folk, we must plot on a map the finds of the beakers; or if we desire to learn the area covered by examples of the ‘lanternes des morts’, a map of France is essential; the same applies to the study of long barrows and to a very great variety of archaeological studies. Moreover, in a more restricted sense, maps of sites are of the essence of the study of antiquity; we cannot understand the strength of the defences of the ancient Jebusite city unless we pore over the map of the excavations on the spur of Ophel. The excavations of every site are unintelligible without an accompanying map. In a still more restricted sense, each ‘find’ requires to have its position stated by the three co-ordinates of map-making: namely, its distance north or south, east or west, from—and above or below—some datum point in the excavations. Further, the maps themselves may furnish the only record left of some relicof antiquity. And,lastly ,ancient maps—and our present-day maps will one day be ancient—are valuable records of the past, of the culture of the age they represent, of population, human distribution and settlement, and, to some extent, of the science and art of the times. It is much to be regretted that so little mapmaking was done in ancient days. We should give a good deal for accurate contemporary plans of Rome of the time of Nero or of the battle of Hastings. And how much more for a contemporary map of Jerusalem and its surrounding country, before the destruction of the Holy City by Titus !

Finely crafted bronze vessels are one of the most distinctive products of early China, and illustrate the emphasis placed on formalised rituals in which these vessels are thought to have played a part. When found in graves, they have also been assumed to testify to the status of the deceased. In this study, it is shown that the repertoire of ritual vessels of bronze are often matched by similar vessels of pottery that were placed in elite graves. Together these suites of vessels indicate not only the status of the deceased but also the social standing of the mourners present during the funerary ceremonies, and in particular, perhaps, the principal heir. Funerals were occasions of ceremony and display in which both sets of vessels—bronze and pottery—may have been used by different participants, including (symbolically) the dead. Thus, early China presents another demonstration of the active and visible role that ostentatious grave goods were designed to play in the living context of funerary ceremonial. The conclusions also emphasise the greater understanding to be achieved by considering different categories of material together, rather than studying pottery and bronzes as separate domains.