Search

Historical research, geomorphological reconstruction, test excavation, and remote sensing are being applied to the search for the caravel Gallega and the outpost Santa Maria de Belen abandoned by Christopher Columbus in 1503. Comparison of modern geographical features with descriptions contained in historical documents identified Rio Belen, Panama, as the most promising locality to search. In spite of unexpected difficulties presented by the physical environment, remote sensing surveys and test excavations revealed anomalies and historical artifacts that may be associated with the target sites.

It has often been said that ships wrecked on coral reefs in shallow tropical water seldom preserve their archaeological integrity: that the wood of the hull is not sufficiently well-preserved to warrant study, that smaller iron artifacts invariably are in poor condition, that ballast of such wrecks has no archaeological significance, and that surviving components of these sites are frequently re-sorted and further degraded with each passing storm to the extent that artifact distributions are rendered senseless. This “conventional wisdom” that all shipwrecks are in “marine peril” and must be salvaged as soon as possible has supplied a pretext under which untold numbers of Caribbean shipwreck sites have been obliterated.Results from three seasons of excavation on a 16th-century shipwreck on Molasses Reef in the Turks and Caicos Islands, British West Indies, indicate that this loss of integrity is not always the case. Field methods for recording distributions of components within the site are describ...