Dr. Sean Kingsley
Dr Sean Kingsley, Director of Wreck Watch & the Centre for East-West Maritime Exploration. Sean has over 25 years of experience working in marine archaeology, specialising in the recording and interpretation of shipwrecks, harbours, pottery and trade patterns. With a doctorate from Oxford University, and as a former visiting research fellow of Reading University, he has consulted as far a field as Montenegro and Israel, where he discovered the largest concentration of shipwrecks in the Eastern Mediterranean in the ‘Solomonic’ port of Dor. He has worked in ancient harbours containing material culture varying in date from 1800 BC to the modern day and on Canaanite, Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, medieval and post-medieval wrecks. Sean specialises in Late Antique, Near Eastern, marine archaeology, Biblical Archaeology.
Sean is also Director of the Centre for East-West Maritime Exploration (EWME). EWME is an independent research hub and think tank focused on investigating global culture, economy, history and archaeology between the Eastern and Western world. We carry out cutting-edge science, research and fieldwork to deepen understanding of our shared past and bring people together to build bridges towards a clearer consideration of where we came from and where we are going. The EWME community bridges past and present to influence the foundations of a clearer future.
Sean is also Director of the Centre for East-West Maritime Exploration (EWME). EWME is an independent research hub and think tank focused on investigating global culture, economy, history and archaeology between the Eastern and Western world. We carry out cutting-edge science, research and fieldwork to deepen understanding of our shared past and bring people together to build bridges towards a clearer consideration of where we came from and where we are going. The EWME community bridges past and present to influence the foundations of a clearer future.
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Books by Dr. Sean Kingsley
From deep in the hold 700 letters were recovered. The largest collection of lost mail from any shipwreck worldwide gives voice to the daily lives, fears and dreams of British soldiers, officers’ wives, businessmen and missionaries writing home to loved ones in England, Scotland and America as Christmas 1940 approached. Their words are a remarkable echo of World War II India and Britain from the frontline to the fireplace.
Voices From The Deep tells the story of British India, the Gairsoppa and the convoy war using the wreck’s wide-ranging finds. The cargo included tea and iron, while the small finds – tea and coffee pots, beer, medicine and liquor bottles, cups, coins, shoes and newspapers – are a vivid snapshot of life at sea for Britain’s merchant marine.
The profound threat of the global fishing industry remains a black hole in marine archaeology, poorly understood and unmanaged. Fishing and Shipwreck Heritage is the first global analysis of the threat of bottom fishing to underwater cultural heritage, examining the diversity, scale and implications on endangered finds and sites. Throughout, the key question of whether it is too late to save the planet’s three million wrecks and how sustainable management is achievable are debated.
Preface (Greg Stemm)
Introduction (Sean Kingsley)
1. Underwater Cultural Heritage & UNESCO in New Orleans
A. Introduction (Sean Kingsley)
B. Archaeologists, Treasure Hunters, & the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage: a Personal Viewpoint (Filipe Castro)
C. The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage: Operational Guidelines & Implementation Challenges (David Bederman)
D. Living with the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage: New Jurisdictions (John Kimbal)
E. Protecting the Past: UNESCO Versus the Private Collector (Greg Stemm)
F. Threats to Underwater Cultural Heritage – Real & Imagined (James Sinclair)
G. UNESCO, Commerce & Fast-Food Maritime Archaeology (Sean Kingsley)
H. The UNESCO Convention for Protecting Underwater Cultural Heritage: a Colombian Perspective (Daniel De Narvaez)
2. Virtual Collections & Private Curators: A Model for the Museum of the Future (Greg Stemm & David J. Bederman)
3. A Note on the Wooden Carpenter’s Rule from Odyssey Shipwreck Site 35F (Stephen Johnston)
4. Brass Guns & Balchin’s Victory (1744): the Background to their Casting (Charles Trollope)
5. Balchin’s Victory: Bronze Cannon Conservation Report (Frederick Van de Walle)
6. La Marquise de Tourny (Site 33c): A Mid-18th Century Armed Privateer of Bordeaux (Neil Cunningham Dobson)
7. The Art & Archaeology of Privateering: British Fortunes & Failures in 1744 (Sean A. Kingsley)
8. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck (Site BA02): A Mid-19th Century American Coastal Schooner off Florida (Ellen Gerth, Neil Cunningham Dobson & Sean Kingsley)
9. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck (Site BA02): the Ceramic Assemblage (Ellen Gerth)
10. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck (Site BA02) Clay Tobacco Pipes (J. Byron Sudbury & Ellen Gerth)
11. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck (Site BA02): the Glass Assemblage (Ellen Gerth & Bill Lindsey)
12. The ‘Atlas’ Survey Zone: Deep-sea Archaeology & U-boat Loss Reassessments (Axel Niestlé
Introduction (Sean Kingsley)
1. The Shipwreck of the SS Republic (1865). Experimental Deep-Sea Archaeology. Part 1: Fieldwork & Site History (Neil Cunningham Dobson, Ellen Gerth and J. Lange Winckler)
2. The Shipwreck of the SS Republic (1865). Experimental Deep-Sea Archaeology. Part 2: Cargo (Neil Cunningham Dobson and Ellen Gerth)
3. The SS Republic Shipwreck Excavation Project: The Coin Collection (Q. David Bowers)
4. Microbiological & Chemical Analysis of Bottles from the SS Republic (David L. Balkwill and April C. Smith)
5. Faith of Our Fathers: Religious Artifacts from the SS Republic (1865) (Hawk Tolson and Ellen Gerth)
6. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck & the Myth of Deep-Sea Preservation (Hawk Tolson)
7. The HMS Sussex Shipwreck Project (Site E-82): Preliminary Report (Neil Cunningham Dobson, Hawk Tolson, Anthony Martin, Brian Lavery, Richard Bates, Fernando Tempera and Jacqui Pearce)
8. Deep-Sea Fishing Impacts on the Shipwrecks of the English Channel & Western Approaches (Sean A. Kingsley)
9. HMS Victory, a First-Rate Navy Warship Lost in the English Channel, 1744. Preliminary Survey & Identification (Neil Cunningham Dobson and Sean A. Kingsley)
10. A Note on Human Remains from the Shipwreck of HMS Victory, 1744 (Neil Cunningham Dobson and Hawk Tolson)
New Rome, new theories on Inter-regional exchange: East Mediterranean economy in Late Antiquity (Sean Kingsley and Michael Decker)
Urban Economies of Late Antique Cyrenaica (Andrew Wilson)
The economic impact of the Palestinian wine trade in Late Antiquity (Sean Kingsley)
Food for an empire: wine and oil production in North Syria (Michael Decker)
Beyond the amphora: non-ceramic evidence for Late Antique industry and trade (Marlia Mundell Mango)
The economy of Late Antique Cyprus (Tassos Papacostas)
LR2: a container for the military annona on the Danubian border? (Olga Karagiorgou)
Specialisation, trade and prosperity: an overview of the economy of the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean (Bryan Ward-Perkins)
Papers by Dr. Sean Kingsley
www.wreckwatchmag.com
This statement calls on the governments of the world to recognise the profound threats of bottom fishing on the Marine Archaeological Critical Resource. It appeals to all stakeholders from divers to heritage managers to end the climate of denial and to respect the non-‐finite character of the resource:
www.rippingupwrecks.com
Analysis of respective contents, distribution and economic structures indicates that such a correlation is an historical misconception. The Dressel 20 amphora was a single-use container used exclusively to distribute olive oil in vast volumes to Rome and the military frontiers of Germany and Britain as a key part of imperial economic policy. The Roman emperors used the annona civica and annona militaris to provide free and subsidized foodstuffs to pacify the public and maintain military morale. Surplus produce re-circulated commercially on the open market.
Olive jars, by contrast, provided Spanish sailors and colonists across the Americas with familiar home comforts of oil, wine, vinegar and honey, amongst a wide range of other commodities. Botijas circulated within a commercial trade network embedded within the Crown’s mercantilist policy geared towards exploitation largely of the industrial riches of the New World. They may be envisioned as purely commercial by-products, rather than engaged cogs, in Habsburg Spain’s protectionist colonial ambitions.
In 1622 when the Tortugas ship, interpreted as the Portuguese-built and Spanish-operated 117-ton Buen Jesús y Nuestra Señora del Rosario, sank in 400m of water, Indian Native American labor had largely been replaced by an enslaved African workforce on the Spanish possessions of the Americas from sugar plantations to mines and households. The dominance of colonoware on the Buen Jesús, combined with this pottery’s co-existence on the Atocha from the same Seville-bound Tierra Firme fleet, suggests an exploitation of African slaves for food preparation and cooking. The Tortugas shipwreck seems to hold the first recorded archaeological evidence for maritime slavery in Spain’s renowned Americas fleets.
Analysis of the jars’ metrologies in relation to the volume of the Castilian arrobas, and fractions of this unit of measurement, reveals an absence of precise standardization in manufacture. The Type 1 jars equate very broadly to vessels of 0.75-1.5 arrobas size, and the Type 2 jars from under 0.25 to over 0.5 arrobas, but with excess volume for each botija. The Tortugas assemblage’s wide differentiation in metrology suggests assembly piecemeal over a lengthy period of time and recycling following former commercial transactions on land and sea. The Buen Jesús’s non-standardized botijas may reflect a time-cutting economic strategy that evolved amongst Seville’s potters and merchants in an era when demand far outstripped supply.
From deep in the hold 700 letters were recovered. The largest collection of lost mail from any shipwreck worldwide gives voice to the daily lives, fears and dreams of British soldiers, officers’ wives, businessmen and missionaries writing home to loved ones in England, Scotland and America as Christmas 1940 approached. Their words are a remarkable echo of World War II India and Britain from the frontline to the fireplace.
Voices From The Deep tells the story of British India, the Gairsoppa and the convoy war using the wreck’s wide-ranging finds. The cargo included tea and iron, while the small finds – tea and coffee pots, beer, medicine and liquor bottles, cups, coins, shoes and newspapers – are a vivid snapshot of life at sea for Britain’s merchant marine.
The profound threat of the global fishing industry remains a black hole in marine archaeology, poorly understood and unmanaged. Fishing and Shipwreck Heritage is the first global analysis of the threat of bottom fishing to underwater cultural heritage, examining the diversity, scale and implications on endangered finds and sites. Throughout, the key question of whether it is too late to save the planet’s three million wrecks and how sustainable management is achievable are debated.
Preface (Greg Stemm)
Introduction (Sean Kingsley)
1. Underwater Cultural Heritage & UNESCO in New Orleans
A. Introduction (Sean Kingsley)
B. Archaeologists, Treasure Hunters, & the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage: a Personal Viewpoint (Filipe Castro)
C. The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage: Operational Guidelines & Implementation Challenges (David Bederman)
D. Living with the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage: New Jurisdictions (John Kimbal)
E. Protecting the Past: UNESCO Versus the Private Collector (Greg Stemm)
F. Threats to Underwater Cultural Heritage – Real & Imagined (James Sinclair)
G. UNESCO, Commerce & Fast-Food Maritime Archaeology (Sean Kingsley)
H. The UNESCO Convention for Protecting Underwater Cultural Heritage: a Colombian Perspective (Daniel De Narvaez)
2. Virtual Collections & Private Curators: A Model for the Museum of the Future (Greg Stemm & David J. Bederman)
3. A Note on the Wooden Carpenter’s Rule from Odyssey Shipwreck Site 35F (Stephen Johnston)
4. Brass Guns & Balchin’s Victory (1744): the Background to their Casting (Charles Trollope)
5. Balchin’s Victory: Bronze Cannon Conservation Report (Frederick Van de Walle)
6. La Marquise de Tourny (Site 33c): A Mid-18th Century Armed Privateer of Bordeaux (Neil Cunningham Dobson)
7. The Art & Archaeology of Privateering: British Fortunes & Failures in 1744 (Sean A. Kingsley)
8. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck (Site BA02): A Mid-19th Century American Coastal Schooner off Florida (Ellen Gerth, Neil Cunningham Dobson & Sean Kingsley)
9. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck (Site BA02): the Ceramic Assemblage (Ellen Gerth)
10. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck (Site BA02) Clay Tobacco Pipes (J. Byron Sudbury & Ellen Gerth)
11. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck (Site BA02): the Glass Assemblage (Ellen Gerth & Bill Lindsey)
12. The ‘Atlas’ Survey Zone: Deep-sea Archaeology & U-boat Loss Reassessments (Axel Niestlé
Introduction (Sean Kingsley)
1. The Shipwreck of the SS Republic (1865). Experimental Deep-Sea Archaeology. Part 1: Fieldwork & Site History (Neil Cunningham Dobson, Ellen Gerth and J. Lange Winckler)
2. The Shipwreck of the SS Republic (1865). Experimental Deep-Sea Archaeology. Part 2: Cargo (Neil Cunningham Dobson and Ellen Gerth)
3. The SS Republic Shipwreck Excavation Project: The Coin Collection (Q. David Bowers)
4. Microbiological & Chemical Analysis of Bottles from the SS Republic (David L. Balkwill and April C. Smith)
5. Faith of Our Fathers: Religious Artifacts from the SS Republic (1865) (Hawk Tolson and Ellen Gerth)
6. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ Shipwreck & the Myth of Deep-Sea Preservation (Hawk Tolson)
7. The HMS Sussex Shipwreck Project (Site E-82): Preliminary Report (Neil Cunningham Dobson, Hawk Tolson, Anthony Martin, Brian Lavery, Richard Bates, Fernando Tempera and Jacqui Pearce)
8. Deep-Sea Fishing Impacts on the Shipwrecks of the English Channel & Western Approaches (Sean A. Kingsley)
9. HMS Victory, a First-Rate Navy Warship Lost in the English Channel, 1744. Preliminary Survey & Identification (Neil Cunningham Dobson and Sean A. Kingsley)
10. A Note on Human Remains from the Shipwreck of HMS Victory, 1744 (Neil Cunningham Dobson and Hawk Tolson)
New Rome, new theories on Inter-regional exchange: East Mediterranean economy in Late Antiquity (Sean Kingsley and Michael Decker)
Urban Economies of Late Antique Cyrenaica (Andrew Wilson)
The economic impact of the Palestinian wine trade in Late Antiquity (Sean Kingsley)
Food for an empire: wine and oil production in North Syria (Michael Decker)
Beyond the amphora: non-ceramic evidence for Late Antique industry and trade (Marlia Mundell Mango)
The economy of Late Antique Cyprus (Tassos Papacostas)
LR2: a container for the military annona on the Danubian border? (Olga Karagiorgou)
Specialisation, trade and prosperity: an overview of the economy of the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean (Bryan Ward-Perkins)
www.wreckwatchmag.com
This statement calls on the governments of the world to recognise the profound threats of bottom fishing on the Marine Archaeological Critical Resource. It appeals to all stakeholders from divers to heritage managers to end the climate of denial and to respect the non-‐finite character of the resource:
www.rippingupwrecks.com
Analysis of respective contents, distribution and economic structures indicates that such a correlation is an historical misconception. The Dressel 20 amphora was a single-use container used exclusively to distribute olive oil in vast volumes to Rome and the military frontiers of Germany and Britain as a key part of imperial economic policy. The Roman emperors used the annona civica and annona militaris to provide free and subsidized foodstuffs to pacify the public and maintain military morale. Surplus produce re-circulated commercially on the open market.
Olive jars, by contrast, provided Spanish sailors and colonists across the Americas with familiar home comforts of oil, wine, vinegar and honey, amongst a wide range of other commodities. Botijas circulated within a commercial trade network embedded within the Crown’s mercantilist policy geared towards exploitation largely of the industrial riches of the New World. They may be envisioned as purely commercial by-products, rather than engaged cogs, in Habsburg Spain’s protectionist colonial ambitions.
In 1622 when the Tortugas ship, interpreted as the Portuguese-built and Spanish-operated 117-ton Buen Jesús y Nuestra Señora del Rosario, sank in 400m of water, Indian Native American labor had largely been replaced by an enslaved African workforce on the Spanish possessions of the Americas from sugar plantations to mines and households. The dominance of colonoware on the Buen Jesús, combined with this pottery’s co-existence on the Atocha from the same Seville-bound Tierra Firme fleet, suggests an exploitation of African slaves for food preparation and cooking. The Tortugas shipwreck seems to hold the first recorded archaeological evidence for maritime slavery in Spain’s renowned Americas fleets.
Analysis of the jars’ metrologies in relation to the volume of the Castilian arrobas, and fractions of this unit of measurement, reveals an absence of precise standardization in manufacture. The Type 1 jars equate very broadly to vessels of 0.75-1.5 arrobas size, and the Type 2 jars from under 0.25 to over 0.5 arrobas, but with excess volume for each botija. The Tortugas assemblage’s wide differentiation in metrology suggests assembly piecemeal over a lengthy period of time and recycling following former commercial transactions on land and sea. The Buen Jesús’s non-standardized botijas may reflect a time-cutting economic strategy that evolved amongst Seville’s potters and merchants in an era when demand far outstripped supply.
On 6 January 1622, Pope Gregory XV established the Sacra Congregatio Propaganda Fide (Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith) to coordinate overseas missionary initiatives. The Congregation was empowered to execute all matters pertaining to the propagation of the faith worldwide. It is hypothesized that in early September 1622 one of its members and a companion were returning to Seville following missionary work in the Americas on the Tortugas ship, identified as the 117-ton Buen Jesús y Nuestra Señora del Rosario, when tragedy struck. The papal plates could have been commissioned by the Church as material expressions of the Congregation’s work and authority overseas. The presence of two additional Seville Blue on White bowls on the wreck, painted with the letters ‘CAR/MO’, may indicate that these ecclesiastic brethren were based in a monastery in the city of Carmona, 30km east of Seville.
The establishment of the Sacra Congregatio Propaganda Fide in 1622 marks the birth of the exploitation of propaganda as a political tool through rigorous control and uniformity. By extension, the two papal plates from the Tortugas shipwreck may be the earliest archaeologically attested use of propaganda in the Early Modern world.
This report quantifies the assemblage and presents a site-specific typology and catalogue of the diagnostic wares. The historical context of the Tortugas wreck’s tablewares within Seville’s pottery industry is summarized, recognizing and characterizing the importance of the Triana district on the west bank of the Guadalquivir River.
Compared to English, Dutch and other European shipwrecks of the 16th and 17th centuries, home-produced ceramics dominate the assemblage from the Tortugas ship, which is identified as the 117-ton Spanish-operated Buen Jesús y Nuestra Señora del Rosario. This trend is embedded within the economic monopoly that Seville and the Casa de Contratacíon exerted over the Americas trade. The Tortugas collection is compared to ceramics associated with Iberian and other European shipwrecks to assess whether this cultural convention was normal or atypical.
The assemblage is extremely similar to the Atocha’s ceramic record despite the fact that this ship from the same 1622 Tierra Firme fleet was far larger and of superior status to the Buen Jesús. The Tortugas ceramic tablewares are a revealing index of unchanged cultural tastes and continued production within Seville’s pottery industry despite the contraction of the Spanish economy at the end of the country’s Golden Age.