HIST 6881/3881: The History and Archaeology of Small Watercraft
Instructor: Dr. Lynn B. Harris
Office: Eller House 201
Office phone: 252-328-1967
Email: harrisly@ecu.edu
Office Hours: M & F: 9:30 – 12:00 p.m., other times by appointment
Graduate Assistant: Lindsay Wentzel, wentzell20@students.ecu.edu
Course Description:
The course is a traditional maritime history class also serving as an applied platform designed for students interested in maritime archaeology, heritage management, historic preservation, and museum curation. It will include studies of a range of watercraft types around the world from pre-historic to modern times. These include, amongst others, Native American, Caribbean, and African dugout canoes, Pacific outriggers, Chinese dragon boats, Swahili dhows, North Carolina fishing boats and assorted recreational craft like English row boats and Bermudian sailing dinghies. Student will also be introduced to a variety of boating communities and boat building traditions drawing upon historical, archaeological, and anthropological sources. Boats studies provide intellectual platforms for discussions and research about society and coastal explorations, transatlantic voyaging, warfare, waterway subsistence patterns, experimental archaeology, virtual computer simulations, boat technology and design.
Dr. Lynn Harris (PhD University of South Carolina) has a background in nautical and terrestrial archaeology and maritime history. She teaches courses in underwater archaeology methods, maritime material culture, maritime landscapes, watercraft history, coastal cultural resource management, African and Caribbean maritime history and archaeology. Teaching assignments have included directing summer abroad study programs and international field schools in Namibia, South Africa, Costa Rica and Dominican Republic. Harris also engages in research projects on the south eastern seaboard that integrate student researchers. Currently, two grant projects are underway. One to research and expand the African American maritime history on Portsmouth Island NC and another to conduct rapid site surveys coastal heritage at risk using a variety of technologies and tools on diverse sites in NC, SC, and GA. Each case study site has state or national historic significance, conservation management challenges and serves as an intellectual platform to segue between preservation of an historic icon and research questions. For the past four years, Harris has lead a collaborative project with Costa Rican partners to study two shipwrecks and maritime legacies in Cahuita located on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.
Lindsay Wentzel is a graduate student in the Maritime Studies program at ECU. Her research interests include the adaption of technology to crisis within historic fisheries from New England to Latin America, and other methods of marine resource extraction. Her thesis examines the reaction of 19th century Provincetown maritime industry to a decline in whaling. This includes adaptive efforts for self-preservation, such as “plum pudding” voyages and the multifunctional usage of vessels within the whale, mackerel, and swordfish fisheries.