The 2014 LAMP Field School season is nearly at its halfway point.
The students have come a long way from blindly fumbling around obstacle courses at the bottom of a pool to performing real underwater archaeology on a revolutionary war era ship wreck.
The Storm Wreck excavation is underway and everyone is hopeful for the potential discoveries.
The true identity of the vessel has yet to be discovered, but it has been narrowed down to one of sixteen possible ships that wrecked roughly a mile of the shore of St. Augustine on December 31, 1782.
Over the past four years, volunteer students from across the country have spent their summers with the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum working to uncover the ship’s last moments. So far, everything from cannons to sail cloth has been recovered on the site. Although much of the site still remains buried beneath the sand, some of the smallest finds have revealed the most information.
Two military buttons from the Scottish 71st Regiment and the Colonial militia the ‘Royal Provincials’ represent the link between the ship’s passengers and the last fleet to leave South Carolina following the fall of Charleston to American troops during the final years of the revolutionary war.
The students of LAMP are the first people to touch these artifacts in nearly 320 years, and the significance is not lost on them. With two weeks left to go in the field school season, there are still potentially countless of personal artifacts left to find beneath the waves!
– Chris McCarron (University of Alabama – Birmingham) and Maddy Roth (St. Mary’s College of Maryland)