Broken Ship, Dead Ship

Abstract

While we think of ships as transporters and connectors, once they break, they become forgotten rejectamenta, removed from the human-social sphere. And yet archaeologists go to great lengths to reinstate their ‘authentic’ sociocultural statuses. This chapter identifies the longstanding metaphorical connections between ships and bodies and the religious associations of bodily failure and fragmentation as the driving forces behind archaeological resurrection. Because the Western academic tradition has developed alongside Early Modern Christian theology, and because archaeology developed out of its defense, there appear to be latent theological motivations behind the ways that nautical archaeologists approach wreckage, especially when located underwater. The sixteenth-century Yarmouth Roads Protected Wreck, of presumed Spanish origin located in English waters, helps flesh out arguments against exhumation.