Nautical Archaeology Society PDF Print E-mail
Friday, 12 October 2007 14:08
FortFollowing the NAS talk at the Rising Sun in January, many club members expressed an interest in attending the "Introduction to foreshore and underwater archaeolgy" course at the English Heritage Centre for Archaeology at Fort Cumberland near Portsmouth. The courses are popular and October 6th was the earliest block booking, however, having started with an enthusiastic 12, eventually that had fallen to 6 on the day. The training venue was inside the fort which started life as an early 18C earthwork battery and gradually evolved into the brick built fort used by the Royal Marines.

The morning was taken up with talks on:
1. basic dating methods (relative to surroundings, absolute using carbon isotope ratios and dendrochronological).
2. maritime law (Mercant Shipping Act, Protection of Wrecks Act etc)
3. Principles and techniques of underwater surveying

The afternoon was taken up with a dry run demonstration of how to survey a site using trilateration and datum offset measurements. Buddy pairs then did it for themselves and converted their data into questionable scaled down drawings. Like transits, there are optimal conditions for both methods. Following the dry run, the real test was finding the pool from the dodgy directions. After overcoming that, the rest was easy: an underwater survey using the newly acquired skills and some control frame sketching thrown in for good measure. This was a non-assessed introductory course and we all came away with an NAS International Training Record Card which means we now need to do three assessed courses to progress up the ladder to the NAS Diploma. All said, this was a fun day out and certainly sparked my enthusiasm for the subject.