old anchor found

[BIGGUNDOCTOR]

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/07/28/long-lost-anchor-may-soon-give-up-its-secrets/

[DSW]

Nice to see them going to the effort to do thing right and preserve it. I just hate to see guys pull up old iron steel artifacts from the ocean only to simply plunk them down as is in the yard to dissolve as the imbedded salts do their thing. I'm not against salvaging things from underwater like some are, since salt water destroys things if you simply leave them, but if you do bring them up you need to do what it takes to preserve them. Otherwise just leave them be.

[Frank Turley]

My co-author, Marc Simmons and I were researching for our book* in the late 1970's, and near Austin, we found Balconi Laboratory, which was conserving a Spanish galleon shipwreck. The wreck occurred in the Gulf of Mexico near Texas. The material culture found on the ocean floor was in litigation as to ownership, so Simmons and I could not use the information or photos for our book. The lab had a large electrolytic tank. The pieces were very much encrusted, some of the smaller ones so much so, that there was no artifact remaining. The encrustation would have a hollow inside. When that happened, a hole was carefully drilled in the mass, and RTV was injected. In that way, the enveloping concretion could be removed and  the shape of the artifact preserved. Clever.

 

I remember that there was a sledge hammer head there that had been conserved, and one could see that it was made of three slaps of iron faggot welded together. We couldn't detect where steel may have been welded on the ends, but we saw faint shuts where the iron cohered. 

 

The field of conservation of artifacts could be one of interest to those majoring in museology. In Europe, they were scientifically ahead of the U.S. for years in this area except perhaps at the Metropolitan, but now we're playing a good "game of catch-up ball."

 

 

 

*"Southwestern Colonial Ironwork"

[arftist]

The lack of a stock indicates that the anchor predates the Civil War, after which steel stocks were used instead of wood. I have caught quite a few anchors,most with no stocks, some with steel stocks but only one with the original wood stock. We preserved it exactly as described.  I fished an area known as the "graveyard of ships" a forty mile stretch where half of the shipwrecks on the entire Atlantic coast occurred.