For all of you joining us, what we're looking at is an early to maybe mid 19th century sailing vessel
which lies off the coast of North Carolina in several thousand feet of water.
In many ways, the archaeology that we're practicing here is not that different from what you would see on CSI on television.
The archaeologists and the other scientists are detectives.
The first thing we do when we walk on the scene is touch nothing and take very careful observations.
How everything lies on the seabed is a hint as to where it came from from the original vessel,
depending on how things shifted as the ship went down.
For those of you who are tuning in and watching, this is a deep-ocean shipwreck,
where the passage of time and organisms have removed most traces of the wood that would be buried beneath the sediment,
leaving only the artifacts, either metals, ceramics, glass, above the surface.
When you approach a site like this,
what you're seeing is a pile of seemingly jumbled artifacts,
but each of those in their position offers clues as to the ship itself.
And indeed with each individual artifact comes a sense of where the ship may have come from and how old it is.