Among the Tentative Haunters: Nautical Archaeology and Other Non-Senses
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-04-09

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.

Sara Rich, Appalachian State University