ECU Maritime Studies: Expedition Costa Rica

11/10/2018

ECU representatives were honored to be invited to attend Seminario Culturales in Cahuita after our fieldschool. It included dramatic presentations of the history of the community and the National Park. Park staff displayed artifacts including manillas or slave bracelets recovered from the shipwreck sites many years ago.

06/10/2018

Some updates on our finds!

03/10/2018

Today Maritime Studies fieldschool students were invited as guests to an English class in Puerto Viejo to engage in conversational topics and describe our fieldschool research. We were treated to a dance performance and each student received a personal handcrafted gift from the Costa Ricans. Maritimers Ryan Miranda, Kendra Lawrence and Joel Cook demonstrated the function of SCUBA gear and explained underwater archaeology methodologies. Afterwards everyone attended attended a NAS Part II presentation on mapping and researching an old oil well in Cahuita National Park presented by the Park Rangers.

03/10/2018

The Maritime Studies field school in Costa Rica is underway. The ECU and Costa Rica Centro team is mapping the underwater shoreline area of Cahuita National Park using a combination grid methodology, offset measurements and GPS coordinates. The team departs at 8:30 am and dives until 12:30pm. We post process our data for two hours after lunch and then attend NAS presentations of our Costa Rican colleagues.

03/10/2018

Our 2018 field season is well underway. We arrived on September 27 to Cahuita and have begun fieldwork on the artifact scatter inshore of the Cannon Site. We will be posting our progress in the coming days.

13/09/2016

After completing work on the Brick Wreck site, the teams dove the cannon site. Each pair of divers recorded the measurements of a number of the cannons and any types of coral growing on them. The visibility was great and made diving this site an amazing experience. (Post by Tyler Ball)

12/09/2016

One of the most important aspects of our archaeological work is position fixing; we need to make sure an objects' location is accurately recorded before we remove it for study. One way to record positions is by using a Total Station, a device that uses infrared lasers to measure the distance from the machine to a prism.

To obtain precise positions for the Brick Wreck site we split into two teams, one on land, hiking to Cahuita Point, with the Total Station, and another in the water positioning a PVC pole on site with the prism attached. Dr. Richards spent most of the day teaching his squad how to take accurate total station points while the aquatic team learned how difficult it is to vertically position five meters worth of PVC pipe in the water! (Post by Kristina Fricker).

07/09/2016

07/09/2016

Today was our third day of work at the Brick Wreck site. ECU and Costa Rican students worked side by side to identify and record artifacts of interest. Each team of two divers were assigned a five meter section of the baseline to systematically search. Teams stretched out 15 meter tapes on both sides of the baseline, and tagged and recorded artifacts found on the sea floor. In the afternoon, ECU and Costa Rican teams worked together on recording finds in their field notebooks, and the Costa Rican students learned how to create measured sketches and scaled drawings. Another day of awesome collaboration in paradise! (Post by Annie Wright).

06/09/2016

Today was intended to be our second day of diving on the Brick Site. The goal was to split into teams of two and find points of interest on the site and mark them onto a grid map of the site, but unfortunately storms rolled in and forced us to cancel diving for the day. Instead, the ECU and Costa Rican students conducted ethnographic interviews of one another. This exercise helped students gain interview experience and learn more about each other’s cultures. Students also continued their NAS training with a focus of project preparation ranging from logistics of setting up a project, to what to do if a site is discovered. The Costa Rican students asked great questions about what to do if they ever found a site which shows how invested the students are in their cultural heritage. (Post by Tyler Caldwell)