Sara Rich | Coastal Carolina University (original) (raw)

Books by Sara Rich

Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti... more Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects—physically or virtually—ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, this book presents them as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with "hauntographs" of five Age of "Discovery" shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny.

No one thinks straight. At least no one remembers straight. But ten years ago, things were differ... more No one thinks straight. At least no one remembers straight. But ten years ago, things were different, weren’t they? Roland Barthes once wrote that color in a photograph is like make-up on a corpse. No one is fooled. In anarchic denial of convenient truths, a young international couple meet and marry on a small Mediterranean island. Ten years later, the couple separate in part due to complications with immigration laws. Following this transcontinental rupture, fragmented histories emerge in response to the woman’s encounters with a series of color snapshots. There is death here, familiar to the mourner, as the photographs issue their special powers to magically and auspiciously predict the future and simultaneously to permit the return of the dead. The woman recognizes pieces of herself as past objects indexed within photographic stills, but paradoxically, she is present, outside in this chaos trying not to fall apart. The images and their objects yawn to remind us of the reluctant destiny of all our beloved memories, bodies, and things: that is, to disintegrate.

Borrowing its title from a passage in The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, Closer to Dust is a séance, a gathering of invitees: inherently biased elegies, the images that conjured them, and the reader- viewer in attendance who is warmly invited to order these intimate fragments into cohesion.

Two of the questions most frequently asked by archaeologists of sites and the objects that popula... more Two of the questions most frequently asked by archaeologists of sites and the objects that populate them are ‘How old are you?’ and ‘Where are you from?’ These questions can often be answered through archaeometric dating and provenance analyses. As both archaeological sites and objects, shipwrecks pose a special problem in archaeometric dating and provenance because when they sailed, they often accumulated new construction material as timbers were repaired and replaced. Additionally, during periods of globalization, such as the so-called Age of Discovery, the provenance of construction materials may not reflect where the ship was built due to long-distance timber trade networks and the global nature of these ships’ sailing routes. Accepting these special challenges, nautical archaeologists must piece together the nuanced relationship between the ship, its timbers, and the shipwreck, and to do so, wood samples must be removed from the assemblage. Besides the provenance of the vessel’s wooden components, selective removal and analysis of timber samples can also provide researchers with unique insights relating to environmental history. For this period, wood samples could help produce information on the emergent global economy; networks of timber trade; forestry and carpentry practices; climate patterns and anomalies; forest reconstruction; repairs made to ships and when, why, and where those occurred; and much more.

This book is a set of protocols to establish the need for wood samples from shipwrecks and to guide archaeologists in the removal of samples for a suite of archaeometric techniques currently available to provenance the timbers used to construct wooden ships and boats. While these protocols will prove helpful to archaeologists working on shipwreck assemblages from any time period and in any place, this book uses Iberian ships of the 16th to 18th centuries as its case studies because their global mobility poses additional challenges to the problem at hand. At the same time, their prolificacy and ubiquity make the wreckage of these ships a uniquely global phenomenon.

Historians commonly recognize that the Cedars of Lebanon were prized in the ancient world, but ho... more Historians commonly recognize that the Cedars of Lebanon were prized in the ancient world, but how can the complex archaeological role of the Cedrus genus be articulated in terms that go beyond its interactions with humans alone? And to what extent can ancient ships and boats made of this material demonstrate such intimate relations with wood? Drawing from object-oriented ontologies and other ‘new materialisms,’ Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships constructs a hylocentric anti-narrative spreading like a canopy from the Cretaceous to the contemporary. With a dual focus on the woods and the watercraft, and on the considerable overlap between them, this book takes another step in the direction of challenging the conceptual binaries of nature/culture and subject/object, while providing an up-to-date synthesis of the relevant archaeological and historical data.

Through a process of binding physical properties and metaphorical manifestations, the fluctuating presence of cedar (forests, trees, and wood) in ancient and contemporary religious thought is interpreted as having had a direct bearing on the practice of shipbuilding in the East Mediterranean. Diachronic excavations at the interstices of allure, lore, and metaphor attempt to navigate the (meta) physical relationships between the forested mountain and the forest afloat, dipping below the surface into these objects’ myriad unique realities.

Papers by Sara Rich

Heritage, 2022

Following Max Liboiron’s claim that pollution is colonialism, the anti-colonial maritime archaeol... more Following Max Liboiron’s claim that pollution is colonialism, the anti-colonial maritime archaeologist’s role in the Anthropocene might be to reframe research questions, so that focus is directed toward interactions between marine and maritime, and that the colonial ‘resurrectionist’ approach that has dominated nautical archaeology ought to be reconsidered altogether. This normative statement is put to the test with a 4000-year-old waterlogged dugout canoe that was illegally excavated from the Cooper River in South Carolina, USA. Upon retrieval, the affected tribal entities were brought into consultation with archaeologists and conservators to help decide how to proceed with the canoe’s remains. Tribal representatives reached a consensus to preserve the canoe with PEG and display it in a public museum. This procedure follows the resurrectionist model typical of maritime archaeology in the West, now the dominant protocol globally, where the scholar acts as savior by lifting entire wrecks from watery graves and promising to grant them immortality in utopian museum spaces. However, this immortalizing procedure is at odds with some Indigenous values, voiced by tribal representatives, which embrace life cycles and distributed agency. In the end, the desire to preserve the canoe as a perpetual symbol of intertribal unity dominated concerns surrounding the canoe’s own life, spirit, and autonomy, and that plasticizing it would permanently alter its substance and essence. We argue that the object of the canoe has become subservient to its postcolonial symbolism of Indigenous unity, resilience, and resistance. Further, by subscribing to the resurrectionist model of maritime archaeology, the immortalized canoe now bears the irony of colonial metaphor, as an unintended consequence of its preservation. We echo Audre Lorde’s famous sentiment by wondering if an anticolonial maritime archaeology can ever hope to dismantle the master’s boat using the master’s tools. The conclusions reached here have implications for other maritime and museum contexts too, including the highly publicized case of the wrecked 1859–1860 slave ship, Clotilda.

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2020

In this article, we provide practical and straightforward guidance for the selection and sampling... more In this article, we provide practical and straightforward guidance for the selection and sampling of shipwreck timbers for dendrochronological research. We outline sampling strategies and present informative ﬁgures that illustrate how to proceed in a variety of scenarios that archaeologists regularly encounter. However, in order to fully exploit the potential of tree-ring research on these objects, we would urge archaeologists to involve dendrochronologists during the project planning phase to carefully plan and conduct adequate sampling of shipwreck assemblages.

This paper presents the latest provenance results of cedar wood (Cedrus sp.) from three ancient w... more This paper presents the latest provenance results of cedar wood (Cedrus sp.) from three ancient watercraft: the Carnegie boat (Middle Kingdom Egypt), the wrecked merchant ship at Uluburun (Bronze Age Mediterranean), and the galley comprising the Athlit Ram (Hellenistic Mediterranean). Comparing the ratios of 87 Sr/ 86 Sr of the archaeological wood and cedar from modern forests has helped augment the existing hypotheses pertaining to where the wood used in the construction of these vessels originated. The results demonstrate that strontium isotopic analysis can provide valuable information to assist wood provenance research in ancient and maritime contexts , which in turn may elucidate ancient forestry and shipbuilding practices.

87Sr/86Sr isotope ratios of cedar wood from forests in the East Mediterranean have been compiled ... more 87Sr/86Sr isotope ratios of cedar wood from forests in the East Mediterranean have been compiled in order to investigate the feasibility of provenancing archaeological cedar wood finds. Cedrus sp. forests furnished a great amount of wood in antiquity, for purposes ranging from ship to temple construction, and for fashioning cult statues and sarcophagi. The 87Sr/86Sr signatures of archaeological cedar samples may be compared with the preliminary dataset presented here to help determine the geographic origin of wooden artifacts. Sample sites include two forest areas in the Troodos Massif of Cyprus, five in the Lebanon, and two in Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. Sr ratios for wood varieties (i.e., early heartwood, late heartwood, sapwood, and twig wood) demonstrate relative uniformity between the xylem types frequently recovered from archaeological contexts. As such, this pilot study also assesses important issues of archaeological sampling and the geographical factors that influence Sr uptake in cedar trees of this region. While the regional signatures are distinct in most cases, small sample sizes and range overlap indicate the need for additional methods to make a case for a certain source forest. Alone, this method continues to be best used to disprove assumed wood provenances.

Heritage, 2022

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2020

Oceangoing wooden ships were built by specialists according to tradition, taste and availability ... more Oceangoing wooden ships were built by specialists according to tradition, taste and availability of materials. When analysing and reconstructing a ship from its archaeological remains, it is not always easy to determine a ship’s size based on the size of its structural timbers. This paper proposes an approach to investigate whether there is a clear relation between the sizes of a ship’s main structural components and its overall size, and whether this relation is regional, functional, and changes in time. Adolfo Miguel Martins, Ana Almeida, Antonio Santos, Ivone Magalhaes, Filipe Castro, Jemma Bezant, Marta Dominguez-Delmas, Nigel Nayling & Peter Gronendijik University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, Wales Title: Reconstructing Trees from Ship Timber Assemblages Using 3D Modelling Technologies: Evidence from Belinho in northern Portugal

TAG 2018 - UF Gainesville

The ongoing European 'refugee crisis' is, among other things, a reminder that waterways have been... more The ongoing European 'refugee crisis' is, among other things, a reminder that waterways have been connecting people for as long as we have been building boats. Since the Paleolithic, boats took travelers from one coast to another shore, from mainlands to islands. Boats have, of course, not always been successful in their endeavors. However, these moments of sinking and sites of wreckage have not hindered people in their overwater (im)migrations; on the contrary, they have encouraged us to adapt waterborne architecture to new needs and new waters, and to foster a spirit of intrepidity. It is ironic then, that maritime archaeologists who study shipwrecks are faced with such difficulty in public outreach. After all, the maritime legacy is the human legacy; it is colonization, trade economy, war, globalization, climate change. In this paper, recent efforts to address the void between humans and their watery world, and the vessels that have succumbed to it, will be analysed to see what has been done to (dis)place wrecked watercraft within the public imaginary, and how these efforts can be improved upon. Ultimately, a revision of how we conceptualize these “ruins underwater” may better integrate the ancient shipwreck with the post-modern sailor.

As works of art and architecture, traditional sailing ships hold a special place within the human... more As works of art and architecture, traditional sailing ships hold a special place within the human imagination. Their designs were responses to aesthetics, techne, and telos, while their capacity to metaphorize liminality is incomparable. And like architects of ruins, nautical archaeologists are both historians and makers as they rebuild ships from shipwrecks. In processes of quasi-resurrection, ships are often reconstructed hypothetically based on information negotiated from wreckage underwater: where it came from, where it was going, which materials constructed it, when it sailed, who and what it carried, why it wrecked, and how it has been interacting with its underwater environment all along. Yet, to accrue the information needed to perform this miraculous resurrection, underwater archaeologists cannot rely on the primacy of vision as do those who work on land. Indeed, submersion dulls or nullifies each of the five senses classically used in scientific and artistic inquiry. Underwater, sight is untrustworthy, smell and taste non-existent, touch numbed, and hearing dominated by the sound of one's own breath. Other 'non-senses' eerily betray us too. Water undermines the sense of passing time, and even common sense declines with increasing depth. Borrowing its title from the Adrienne Rich poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” this paper will explore how shipwreck and archaeologist are affected by aqueous ontologies, and how roles of haunter and haunted can switch through processes of nautical inquiry.

ForSEAdiscovery (EU Marie Curie Actions project) aims to reconstruct past Iberian forestry in rel... more ForSEAdiscovery (EU Marie Curie Actions project) aims to reconstruct past Iberian forestry in relation to shipbuilding from the 16 th to 18 th centuries. The project comprises fifteen research fellows from diverse academic backgrounds to develop a multidisciplinary approach to data collection from archives, archaeological sites, and forests. The team is divided into three research work packages: history, nautical archaeology, and wood science. Our team of nautical archaeologists have been recording, sampling, and analysing timber from shipwrecks in order to provide other work packages with significant data. In this way, individual research projects are incorporated within the broader aims of ForSEAdiscovery, with the project's framework resting on this multidisciplinary team and the confluence of different scientific perspectives. Here we present two case studies of fieldwork during 2015. The Galician case study is based on the data collected from three wooden shipwrecks: an 18 th century French corvette, an 18 th century Spanish frigate, and a 16 th century Spanish galleon. The Portuguese case study investigated the remains of a 16 th century Iberian shipwreck washed ashore. These examples demonstrate how a multidisciplinary, international team has approached shared research questions, the lessons that have been learned, and how these can be applied to future multidisciplinary investigations.

Like ghosts in a flooded and forgotten storm cellar, shipwreck realities are so far removed from ... more Like ghosts in a flooded and forgotten storm cellar, shipwreck realities are so far removed from our own that they exist in a kind of ontological void, where the lack of a sense of presence leads to a lack of perceived being – in Derridian terms, a hauntology (his pun on ‘ontology’). In this respect, a hauntograph would address that phantasmal tension in space between public and private that bears directly on audience/artist/archaeologist interpretation, and it is this illusory place where the new project Shipwreck Hauntography focuses its efforts.
My first two attempts at creating hauntographs have as their subject matter the Yarmouth Roads Protected Shipwreck, where I have overseen excavations in 2015-2016. Lying in rather unruly waters, the Yarmouth Roads is an Early Modern Mediterranean merchant vessel located at a depth of -6m in the Solent Strait between the Isle of Wight and the south coast of mainland England. In using collage and transparency, I tried to negotiate the many layers of this shipwreck: its stratigraphy, centuries of deposition, decades of tidal erosion, seasons of excavation, and its countless unrecorded histories like palimpsests, neatly obscured from human access.
Shipwrecks are often understood, even by archaeologists who study them, as little more than dead ships. Shipwreck Hauntographs seek to explore, through archaeological and artistic processes, shipwrecks as liminal objects that are capable of negotiating those murky, fluid boundaries between past and present, presence and absence.

As works of art and architecture, traditional sailing ships hold a special place within the human... more As works of art and architecture, traditional sailing ships hold a special place within the human imagination. Their designs were responses to aesthetics, techne, and telos, while their capacity to metaphorize liminality is incomparable. And like architects of ruins, nautical archaeologists are both historians and makers as they rebuild ships from shipwrecks. In processes of quasi-resurrection, ships are often reconstructed hypothetically based on information negotiated from the wreckage underwater: where it came from, where it was going, which materials constructed it, when it sailed, who and what it carried, why it wrecked, and how it has been interacting with its underwater environment all along. Yet, to accrue the information needed to perform this miraculous resurrection, nautical archaeologists cannot rely on the primacy of vision as do those who work on land. Indeed, submersion dulls or nullifies each of the five senses classically used in scientific and artistic inquiry. Underwater, sight is untrustworthy, smell and taste non-existent, touch numbed, and hearing dominated by the sound of one's own breath. Other 'non-senses' betray us too. Water undermines the sense of passing time, and even common sense declines with increasing depth. Borrowing its title from the Adrienne Rich poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” this paper will explain how shipwreck and archaeologist confront each other in an uncanny space, and how the distinct roles of haunter and haunted are undermined through processes of nautical inquiry.

Presentation on behalf of the Nautical Archaeology work package of ForSEAdiscovery (Marie Curie P... more Presentation on behalf of the Nautical Archaeology work package of ForSEAdiscovery (Marie Curie PITN-GA-2013-607545) at the 2nd European Conference on Scientific Diving at the Sven Loven Centre for Marine Infrastructure (University of Gothenberg) in Kristineberg, Sweden.

As the ultimate objects of mobility, ships and boats also literalize metaphor: meta (across) + ph... more As the ultimate objects of mobility, ships and boats also literalize metaphor: meta (across) + phorein (carry). A fleeting moment, a naval fleet, both have etymological origins in the Old English floetan (to drift, float, or flow) – the object is inextricable from its temporal-spatial passage and physical form. Ships are collections (authenticated by the past), but somehow they are also souvenirs (authenticating the past), and as both, they physically and metaphorically mediate time and space. But what about shipwrecks, who have failed in their task of carriage? While we speak of ships as transporters and connectors, like other tools, once they break, they are disposed of and become forgotten rejectamenta, removed from the human-social sphere. And yet when we examine them, we go to great lengths to reinstate their ‘authentic’ socio-cultural statuses, possibly at the expense of other endeavours. This paper will analyse these paradoxes using a recent movement in metaphysical philosophy, object-oriented ontology. This philosophy is deanthropocentric and largely anti-social; that is, without the Kantian subject-object or human-world divide, or a reliance on agents of exchange or actor networks, objects are simply autonomous and completely inexhaustible. When applied to archaeology, which often tends to embrace the socio-cultural aspects of objects without embracing the rest, it means that objects can be understood, not through their physical properties or networks of relationships, but as intrinsically paradoxical and with an infinite informational capacity. In essence, shipwreck-objects can be seen as ontological sources of movement and cessation, independent of the (social) human gaze.

Egyptian cedar was imported from Lebanese forests. If Black pine, tamarisk, and Austrian oak comp... more Egyptian cedar was imported from Lebanese forests. If Black pine, tamarisk, and Austrian oak compose a ship’s timbers, the vessel must have originated in southern Turkey. These and other assumptions of dendroprovenance, or determining the forest origin of archaeological wood, which in turns determines the origin of the archaeological object made from this wood, are often problematic. This paper will address how text- and lab-based results must be coupled to arrive at the most accurate conclusions of wood origin, and to take into account material mobility. Given issues of toponyms and translations, wood origin has been the focus of a number of scientific investigations in recent years. New scientific methods have been developed and old ones adapted to address common assumptions, which often ignore the nuances of species distribution and extra-regional trade networks. Current lab-based dendroprovenance techniques include DNA studies, dendrochronology, dendroarchaeology, trace element and isotopic analyses, and anatomical markers. However, each of these techniques is crippled by limitations, especially in the Near East where there is no absolute tree-ring chronology, and where modern species distributions may differ considerably from those in the (deep) past. Although of far-reaching potential, strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) analysis can only either support or refute existing hypotheses; e.g., in providing a clear non-match between the archaeological sample and its supposed origin. By themselves, matches, even of identical isotopic ratios, cannot absolutely ensure a geographical origin because no “strontium map” can ever be truly complete. So while this method offers a unique way to weed out pre-existing origin hypotheses, it must be coupled with other approaches to generate new hypotheses. Taking advantage of historical texts that describe forests, trade relations, and other patterns of source/resource and process/product can illuminate the data provided through lab-based approaches. This paper will provide a case study in the Athlit Ram in which ancient texts have been used together with 87Sr/86Sr analysis to provenance the cedar (Cedrus sp.) wood of the ship’s hull to the Troodos during Ptolemaic Cyprus. In the process of doing so, and in determining the reasons for selecting timber from this particular source, this paper also brings to light a series of double entendres implicit in the acts of ancient seafaring and shipbuilding.

The submerged Mesolithic site at Bouldnor Cliff offers a unique glimpse into the rapidly changing... more The submerged Mesolithic site at Bouldnor Cliff offers a unique glimpse into the rapidly changing coastal environment ca. 8000 BP. At a depth of only 11m in the Solent, wood artefacts and ecofacts have survived in an anoxic layer of peat overlaid with a clay stratum, and in association with several deposits of worked flints. Careful diving, excavation, and sampling protocols were followed to ensure that the fragile, waterlogged timbers were surfaced in the same condition as when they were deposited. The high level of wood preservation has made it possible to determine which of these timbers are ecofacts, forest detritus from the once-freshwater fen, and which are artefacts, timbers worked with stone tools at what may have been a logboat construction site. While many timbers are likely ecofacts representing the surrounding oak (Quercus sp.) dominated forest and others are of ambiguous categorization, a few are clearly artefacts. These include oak trunk fragments with apparent axe or adze hollowing marks, wood ‘cores’ with ‘chip’ debitage, axe marks on de-barked limbs, sharpened pegs, and an intriguing group of planks that were cut flat on one side and rounded on the other. As a whole, the assemblage is indicative of woodworking and timber conversion technologies not attested elsewhere in Britain until 2000 years later, if at all. The site also demonstrates the human responses to a changing coastline, one of which was addressing the needs for waterborne transit in an increasingly marshy environment that would soon succumb to the ingressive sea.

Introduction to project team and how my past experiences will relate to my responsibilities and r... more Introduction to project team and how my past experiences will relate to my responsibilities and research approaches as Experienced Researcher of Work Package 2: Nautical Archaeology.

This research follows a distinct path to the determination and contextualization of ship timber p... more This research follows a distinct path to the determination and contextualization of ship timber provenance, namely the path of a piece of cedar wood from the forest to the ship, to the archaeological record, and its provenance back to the original forest. It is often assumed that cedar wood originated in the Lebanon, but these results demonstrate that 1) cedar (Cedrus sp.) forests in Cyprus and Syria were also accessed for shipbuilding, and 2) in two of the three ships examined here, selection of wood from certain forests had religious implications, suggesting that cedar ship timbers may have symbolized certain deities or sacred concepts. Strontium isotopic analyses (86Sr/87Sr) complement historical data to determine the source origins for archaeological cedar wood samples from Egyptian Pharaoh Senwosret III's buried Carnegie boat, hull wood from the famous Uluburun shipwreck (Turkey), and the ramming timber of the Athlit Ram from a wrecked trireme (Israel). Non-nautical wood has also been examined, including timbers from the ziggurat of Nabonidus in Ur (Iraq), beams from Al-Aqsa Mosque (Israel), and a Saite period sarcophagus from the Nicholson Museum in Sydney (Australia), and these are included in an appendix. Provenances were determined by creating a data set of strontium isotopic ratios for living cedar forests in the Eastern Mediterranean, then matching the measured values of archaeological wood (unknowns) to those from the modern forests (knowns). In addition to determining provenance using geochemical methods, conclusions are also reliant upon the numerous historical records relating to cedar use in antiquity that serve to elucidate the numerical values and to contextualize them according to time period and culture. The findings presented here are extremely important to the future of archaeological science, and they are also relevant for redefining the ancient timber trade and shipbuilding processes. The results have demonstrated that strontium isotopes can be used to provenance archaeological cedar wood, which was used liberally in elite constructions throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. One of the other most intriguing discoveries presented here is that the provenance of ancient ship wood during the Bronze Age is directly related to how the ancients perceived cedar forests and ships made from them as sacred. Other studies have discussed the role of religion in ancient seafaring, but this is the first to explore the role of religion in shipbuilding. By contextualizing the numerical values within the realms of history, mythology and ritual, this dissertation also attempts to confront the disparity between studies of science and those of religion.