ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Archaeol.
Sec. Landscape and Geological Processes
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fearc.2025.1614837
This article is part of the Research TopicIndigenous Maritime ArchaeologyView all 3 articles
Two-Eyed Seeing into Shipwrecks: Maritime Microscopy in the South Carolina Lowcountry
Provisionally accepted
- 1Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, United States
- 2Coastal Carolina University, Conway, Arkansas, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
By enhancing methods for how archaeology can contribute to the study of multi-species shipwrecks (or shipwreck ecology), this paper reconsiders the function of nonfunctioning ships and boats from anti-colonial and Native American perspectives. In partnership with the Waccamaw Indian People and the Indigenize SC Education Task Force, wood samples from several submerged wreck sites in a blackwater tidal river in the Lowcountry of South Carolina (USA) were analyzed for their archaeological potentials and for their potential to disclose the performance of individual sites within the underwater ecosystems of which they are a part. In turn, this information offers the opportunity to inform the public about the ecological roles of wreckage, thereby expanding the typical archaeological research questions into ones pertaining to sovereignty: namely, Indigenous and water. Following a thorough review of relevant literature and theory, the results of microscopic analyses of submerged sites are presented, along with an introduction to the interactive museum exhibit derived from the data and the questions they raise. In these ways, the paper moves between archaeological theory, scientific methodology, and the practice of public pedagogy.
Keywords: anti-colonial science, Indigenous Sovereignty, nautical architecture, Necrobiome, Place-based research, shipwreck microbial ecology, water sovereignty
Received: 19 Apr 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rich, Raimondi and Herness. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sara Rich, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.