Brandeis University
01/08/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/08/2025 05:01
Digging in the deep
Digging in the deep
Students in Charlie Goudge's maritime archaology class inspect a miniature artifact excavated from a handmade model of a shipwreck.
Photo Credit: Gaelen Morse
By Gaelen Morse
January 8, 2025 • Humanities and Social Sciences
On a crisp October morning, a small group of Brandeis archaeology students hover above a mysterious wooden shipwreck. Its age and provenance are unknown-but as the group sifts through the fine sand at the bottom, they slowly uncover a trove of artifacts. The tip of a broadsword. A gleaming silver helmet. The wooden carriage of a powerful cannon. Each one will provide tantalizing clues to the wreck's origins.
Conducting a dig like this in the open ocean usually requires a web of complex logistics, support crew, and specialized underwater equipment. These students, however, don't have to worry about pesky details like SCUBA gear or seasickness, or even getting their feet wet. The ships they're investigating are only about 14 inches long, nestled at the bottom of small plastic boxes in Brandeis' archeology lab.
The idea of using mini wrecks to teach maritime archeology first came to Charlotte "Charlie" Goudge, assistant professor of anthropology, while stranded overseas due to COVID. Over the course of a few months, she painstakingly hand-built (and hand-wrecked) four intricate wooden models of ancient ships, including a tiny Viking longboat, a Chinese junk, a Spanish galleon, and renaissance-era trading vessel. After gluing the hulls permanently to the bottom of custom plexiglass enclosures, Goudge added dozens of tiny "artifacts", then carefully buried everything in a few layers of sand, rock, and silt.
In class, Goudge gives her students a basic crash-course on archaeological excavation, then turns them loose on the sites, providing nothing but the wreck's (fictional) GPS coordinates. From there, each group needs to map their site, catalog its artifacts, and piece together its history based on the evidence they find.
"It's very self-directed. one of the things I like so much about this course is that students can go with the information in different ways, think outside the box, and figure out "how do I do this," rather than "what am I being told to do?" She says.
The process requires a bit of imagination: students are digging in miniature with long sundae spoons, tea strainers, and tiny paintbrushes. The artifacts they're uncovering are made up of an eclectic blend of parts-from plastic Lego swords to dollhouse china to 3D-printed Spanish cannons fabricated by the Brandeis Maker Lab. From these objects, Goudge says, students can start to unravel the story of the people who built and sailed each ship.
"That's ultimately the interest for archeologists. We can look at bits and bobs as much as we like, but after the dig is over, we need to start thinking about who used what, and why?" Goudge says. "Obviously, in this case, the site is tiny and imaginary, but the same real-world concepts apply."
Like an actual wreck site, she adds, these models offer a snapshot of the past. When interpreted carefully, each one can provide insight on the ways that certain cultures lived, traded, and sometimes violently clashed. To drive her point home, Goudge gestures towards a miniscule Viking longboat that sits on a workbench across the room:
"The story I came up for that one was that it sank off the coast of Scotland. It had just sacked a monastery there, and was carrying huge amounts of gold and weaponry and all that sort of stuff," she says. "So the wreck is not just a thing carrying a bunch of metal-you have to think about it in terms of the vast events going on during the time of the Anglo Saxons, the impact the Vikings had on Britain and England, and the ways in which Christianity and paganism change as a result."
In all, these tiny wrecks provide a surprisingly realistic introduction to maritime archaeology. Students go from knowing almost nothing about their dig site to being completely enveloped by it, creating detailed reports that lay out their findings as they go. Essentially, they're following the same trajectory as archaeologists working in the field.
For some of her students, like Nicole Van Meter, GSAS '25, that experience is directly relevant: Van Meter studied archeology at the University of Florida, and after earning her master's in anthropology at Brandeis, she plans to continue working in coastal areas of the sunshine state-a place where coastal sites are in real danger of being swallowed by rising seas.
"Because I plan to work in coastal regions, it's likely that at some point I'll encounter some sort of underwater site, whether it's a shipwreck or a former terrestrial site that was once on land and is now underwater," she says. "In that sense, what I'm learning here is really useful."
Goudge didn't only design the course only for anthropology students, however. In fact, most of the class is made up of nonmajors. Their fields of study range from computational linguistics to English literature-and Goudge is hopeful that her mini-shipwrecks will have a subtle, intangible impact on that cohort.
"For me, it's all about infusing archaeology, and getting students excited about what the field can be," she says "The real lessons aren't just the techniques and methodologies, but the impact that the work has on us as humans."
Conducting a dig like this in the open ocean usually requires a web of complex logistics, support crew, and specialized underwater equipment. These students, however, don't have to worry about pesky details like SCUBA gear or seasickness, or even getting their feet wet. The ships they're investigating are only about 14 inches long, nestled at the bottom of small plastic boxes in Brandeis' archeology lab.
The idea of using mini wrecks to teach maritime archeology first came to Charlotte "Charlie" Goudge, assistant professor of anthropology, while stranded overseas due to COVID. Over the course of a few months, she painstakingly hand-built (and hand-wrecked) four intricate wooden models of ancient ships, including a tiny Viking longboat, a Chinese junk, a Spanish galleon, and renaissance-era trading vessel. After gluing the hulls permanently to the bottom of custom plexiglass enclosures, Goudge added dozens of tiny "artifacts", then carefully buried everything in a few layers of sand, rock, and silt.
In class, Goudge gives her students a basic crash-course on archaeological excavation, then turns them loose on the sites, providing nothing but the wreck's (fictional) GPS coordinates. From there, each group needs to map their site, catalog its artifacts, and piece together its history based on the evidence they find.
"It's very self-directed. one of the things I like so much about this course is that students can go with the information in different ways, think outside the box, and figure out "how do I do this," rather than "what am I being told to do?" She says.
The process requires a bit of imagination: students are digging in miniature with long sundae spoons, tea strainers, and tiny paintbrushes. The artifacts they're uncovering are made up of an eclectic blend of parts-from plastic Lego swords to dollhouse china to 3D-printed Spanish cannons fabricated by the Brandeis Maker Lab. From these objects, Goudge says, students can start to unravel the story of the people who built and sailed each ship.
"That's ultimately the interest for archeologists. We can look at bits and bobs as much as we like, but after the dig is over, we need to start thinking about who used what, and why?" Goudge says. "Obviously, in this case, the site is tiny and imaginary, but the same real-world concepts apply."
Like an actual wreck site, she adds, these models offer a snapshot of the past. When interpreted carefully, each one can provide insight on the ways that certain cultures lived, traded, and sometimes violently clashed. To drive her point home, Goudge gestures towards a miniscule Viking longboat that sits on a workbench across the room:
"The story I came up for that one was that it sank off the coast of Scotland. It had just sacked a monastery there, and was carrying huge amounts of gold and weaponry and all that sort of stuff," she says. "So the wreck is not just a thing carrying a bunch of metal-you have to think about it in terms of the vast events going on during the time of the Anglo Saxons, the impact the Vikings had on Britain and England, and the ways in which Christianity and paganism change as a result."
In all, these tiny wrecks provide a surprisingly realistic introduction to maritime archaeology. Students go from knowing almost nothing about their dig site to being completely enveloped by it, creating detailed reports that lay out their findings as they go. Essentially, they're following the same trajectory as archaeologists working in the field.
For some of her students, like Nicole Van Meter, GSAS '25, that experience is directly relevant: Van Meter studied archeology at the University of Florida, and after earning her master's in anthropology at Brandeis, she plans to continue working in coastal areas of the sunshine state-a place where coastal sites are in real danger of being swallowed by rising seas.
"Because I plan to work in coastal regions, it's likely that at some point I'll encounter some sort of underwater site, whether it's a shipwreck or a former terrestrial site that was once on land and is now underwater," she says. "In that sense, what I'm learning here is really useful."
Goudge didn't only design the course only for anthropology students, however. In fact, most of the class is made up of nonmajors. Their fields of study range from computational linguistics to English literature-and Goudge is hopeful that her mini-shipwrecks will have a subtle, intangible impact on that cohort.
"For me, it's all about infusing archaeology, and getting students excited about what the field can be," she says "The real lessons aren't just the techniques and methodologies, but the impact that the work has on us as humans."