Archives and shipwrecks in the Baltic
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-02-10

The brackish waters of the Baltic hide thousands of shipwrecks from different eras. Most known wrecks of sailing vessels are from historical times and later than medieval. How can we compare and combine the sources from archives and archaeological data from shipwrecks to make their story complete and also scientifically valid?
Shipwrecked sailing vessels are often far away from their home harbor. Before becoming a shipwreck, a ship’s “life” can have several phases from building to re-building, re-use, abandonment or destruction by an accident or conflict. With shipwrecks, multidisciplinary research is needed to collect the data. When there is an idea of the port of origin of the find, there is a chance to start the research in archives. Sometimes an archival source – a document like an accident report or an announcement in the newspaper – leads to a systematic search for a possible place of wreckage. As archaeologists, we must learn to read both the material culture and archival sources, which possibly relate to each other. In this paper, two cases from Finnish waters will be presented, which have both archaeological findings and written sources associated with them.
The first case is that of a remarkable medieval maritime accident with quite a lot of written documents telling its story. The possible site of the accident is in the brackish waters of the Gulf of Finland. How might we interpret the scattered pieces of a wreck in the area, and how might we reconstruct the accident from the late 15th century? The other case is related to two shipwrecks of 18th-century merchant ships. Would it be possible to combine written documents, like toll and salvage records, to find a shipwreck? Is it possible to identify a shipwreck, and what methods should beused in the archaeological research process?

Author - PhD Student Alvik, Riikka, The National Board of Antiquities, Helsinki, Finland (Presenting author)