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| Local grad maps shipwreck in Florida Keys By Greg Thomas [ greg@hmbreview.com ] Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 1:01 PM PDT Recent college graduate Reid Harwood of Half Moon Bay returned home from the Florida Keys last week where he participated in a two-week underwater field school to map a historic shipwreck. The Menemon Sanford, a coastal paddle steamboat first launched in 1854, was transporting a regiment of New York infantry when it struck Carysfort Reef near Key Largo in 1862. Though the crew was able to evacuate safely, the boat sank and the pilot was placed under arrest for negligence. With more than 2,000 shipwrecks in the Florida Keys, government agencies aren’t able to keep up with mapping and documenting the details of each one, and they’re only getting older and more tarnished. That’s where Partnering Archaeology with Science and Technology, a nonprofit educational foundation, comes in. PAST has created field school programs that take small groups of university students out to historic sites to give them hands-on experience with modern archaeology. “The main purpose of these field schools is to make archaeology and anthropology accessible to interested students,” PAST spokeswoman Tessa Riess said. “There are few universities around the U.S. that have these majors and even fewer have training schools. We also do training programs for teachers (in these subject areas), so they can better learn how to teach the subjects.” Seven students, including Harwood, were selected earlier this year for the expedition to map and document the Sanford wreck site. The program began July 28 and ended Aug. 8. “It was awesome; I had a great time,” said Harwood, who took an active interest in shipwrecks and archaeology his final semester at University of Colorado. “I took a class on maritime archaeology, then found this (program opportunity) online and jumped on it.” The first three days of the program, he explained, are dedicated to background research on the wreck site, completed at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility in Florida. “Students get a sense of how much the site changes every year,” Riess said. “One year something (at the wreck site) is totally exposed and the next year you can’t even make out what it is. We also did lectures (the first few days) on how to map underwater, which is very difficult, especially considering the students can’t talk to each other.” Once background research and preparation was complete, the students applied their new skills in the field, going on a series of dives in which they physically map the different aspects of the wreck. “They use an angle-distance method to map the placement and size of artifacts underwater with a tape measure,” Riess said. Students also establish data points around the wreck, she said, to properly situate the site in satellite Global Positioning Systems for precise location. When they’re not in the water, the students are in the lab polishing their underwater sketches of the wreck. The measurements are incorporated to recreate the distinct aspects of the site to scale, thus mapping the shipwreck. “It’s good to put these wrecks into history,” Riess said. “Anything underwater is a cultural resource and every year (the wrecks) get eaten away a little bit more — they’re always changing. So if students can map it now, people in the future can do more in-depth research and they’ll be able to base it off previous studies.” This was Harwood’s first hands-on experience and he said he’s already looking into participating in other similar programs and even a related job. “For now, I’m just looking around to see what I can find in this field and hopefully I’ll be able to get a job, get my foot in the door, like it, and pursue it.” |