On Thursday LAMP’s team of archaeologists recovered an encrusted flintlock musket from the site of the Storm Wreck, a late 18th century shipwreck that has been the focus of excavation every summer since 2010. Frequent storms, unusual for the summer months, have caused significant delays in this year’s fieldwork, by burying the site and by preventing us from being able to work it. It took a few weeks to uncover our grids and get our travel and grid lines back into a usable system, and we have found a number of artifacts becoming exposed due to erosion at what we thought were the boundaries of our site. One of these objects was discovered on the previous Tuesday, by yours truly. After groping around in the dark and feeling the object, I was pretty sure that it was a musket, as it was about the right length and appeared to feature the trigger guard and the remains of the stock in about the right place. Subsequent diving by some of our archaeologists who have worked with historic firearms confirmed its identity, and we brought it up to the surface and back home safely on Friday.
Lots of great news stories have come out of this latest find. Check out some of the links below . . .
Channel 4 story and video
Channel 4 slideshow
Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville newspaper), a great story by Dan Scanlan
St. Augustine Record story
We even got some interest from Spanish-language outlets, including Que, Yahoo! Espanol, El Confidencial, and Canarias7.
We’ve been so busy with our summer Field School and field season that we haven’t been updating the blog regularly, but stay tuned, we’ll have some more updates online soon!
