WEBVTT

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For all of you joining us, what we're looking at is an early to maybe mid 19th century sailing vessel

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which lies off the coast of North Carolina in several thousand feet of water.

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In many ways, the archaeology that we're practicing here is not that different from what you would see on CSI on television.

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The archaeologists and the other scientists are detectives.

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The first thing we do when we walk on the scene is touch nothing and take very careful observations.

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How everything lies on the seabed is a hint as to where it came from from the original vessel,

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depending on how things shifted as the ship went down.

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For those of you who are tuning in and watching, this is a deep-ocean shipwreck,

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where the passage of time and organisms have removed most traces of the wood that would be buried beneath the sediment,

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leaving only the artifacts, either metals, ceramics, glass, above the surface.

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When you approach a site like this,

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what you're seeing is a pile of seemingly jumbled artifacts,

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but each of those in their position offers clues as to the ship itself.

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And indeed with each individual artifact comes a sense of where the ship may have come from and how old it is.