We are delighted to announce that SAMPHIRE has won the prestigious European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Awards 2017. SAMPHIRE, which was funded by The Crown Estate, was devised and run by Wessex Archaeology, using the expertise of Dr Jonathan Benjamin, and former Wessex Archaeology Manager John McCarthy who is now based with Dr Benjamin at Flinders University in South Australia.

The award win is one of two in the UK and comes in the Education, Training and Awareness-raising category, since the project team worked with local communities along Scotland’s west coast to help find previously unknown archaeological sites in the marine environment. This was done through face-to-face meetings with harbour masters, scallop divers, recreational divers, fishermen and others, as well as with local residents in the coastal towns and villages. Once the identified locations had been recorded, the most promising were visited by teams of professional and volunteer archaeological divers to verify the information received.

The European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Awards was launched by the European Commission in 2002, and has since been run by Europa Nostra. It celebrates and promotes best practices related to heritage conservation, research, management, voluntarism, education and communication. In this way, it contributes to a stronger public recognition of cultural heritage as a strategic resource for Europe’s economy and society. The Prize is supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Independent expert juries examined a total of 202 applications from 39 countries across Europe, and chose just 29 winners in a number of different categories.

Chris Brayne, Chief Executive of Wessex Archaeology, said:

“We are delighted to have been announced as a winner of this prestigious European prize which celebrates best practice in heritage conservation, research, management, education and communication. This was an innovative, collaborative, project which involved over 100 members of the local community along the coast of West Scotland. We were very fortunate in being able to partner with a great many local and national organisations including community dive clubs and scientific partners such as the Scottish Association of Marine Science”.

Chris and the SAMPHIRE team will be presented with their award by EU Commissioner Navracsics and Maestro Placido Domingo at an event in Finland on 15 May 2017.

From now until the 3rd of May you have the opportunity to cast your vote in as People’s Choice award for SAMPHIRE and 30 other fantastic projects at https://vote.europanostra.org/ Voters have the chance to win a trip for two to Finland and be a special guest at the Awards Ceremony. Details of the Europa Nostra press release are quoted below.

SAMPHIRE: Maritime heritage project in western Scotland

In exploring beneath the waves of Scotland’s West coast, the team behind SAMPHIRE – Scottish Atlantic Maritime Past: Heritage, Investigation, Research & Education has added a rich new layer to the fabric of Scotland’s history. The holistic approach of this project was impressive and left no stone unturned in investigating new approaches to safeguarding our shared underwater heritage.

The project is the result of a collaboration of researchers from Scotland, Spain and Australia which sought to investigate how community engagement in West Scottish coastal communities could increase our understanding of archaeological sites off the Scottish coast.  Its unique approach has fostered dialogue between professional maritime archaeologists and local community members including divers, fishermen, historians and others with knowledge of the seafloor in their area.

SAMPHIRE’s well considered methodology is repeated on an annual basis. The team dedicatedly researches, raises awareness and distributes their findings both online and on the ground in local communities through focus groups and print materials. They achieve this through contact with museums, community halls, dive clubs and harbour offices.

“A major part of this project’s success was the community’s choice of their own ‘local champion’, giving ownership of the heritage to these local communities. The project gave these participants the skills and confidence to participate in a major archaeological project which may otherwise have been viewed as being in the inaccessible domain of specialists”, stated the jury.

In the period since the project began three years ago, over 100 new sites have been revealed and recorded thanks to their mammoth efforts. This exceptional figure is telling of the effectiveness of SAMPHIRE’s approach and makes a strong case for engaging communities as a means to accurately identify, record and protect archaeological sites, maritime or otherwise. “We appreciated this project’s commitment to engaging and learning from local communities and the way in which they have shown that working together can lead to great discoveries”, added the jury.

“This project was not just a survey but also contributed to identity building in these West Scottish communities and encouraged the participants to act as stewards of their heritage. It has had a far reaching and long lasting effect in inspiring consciousness of heritage sites and, impressively, informing fishing practices where known drowned heritage assets are located. SAMPHIRE’s methodology has a great degree of transferability and is an excellent model for similar sites throughout Europe”, emphasised the jury.

The printed copies of the final SAMPHIRE report, covering the 2015 investigations have arrived at our Edinburgh office. This last report is bursting with amazing archaeological sites. Over the next few days and weeks these will be winging their way out to all of our 2015 project participants. Huge thanks are due to The Crown Estate for their help with printing and for all their support through the project.

Now that we have the final report we can finally put all three reports together on the shelf! It’s nice to see that the landscape shots line up quite nicely although they were taken in totally different parts of Scotland’s west coast.

We’ve updated our online interactive map with all of the archaeological discoveries made during the three years of the project. Why not have a look around and see what’s been recorded in your local area? For best results view this map in full screen mode. You can also click on the images in some of the entries to scroll through photographs of each site. As well as the archaeological sites there are also entries for our blogs so you can see where the team went to meet local people.

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A photograph provided by Tyneside divers of the Cathcart Park. Copyright Andy Hunt/Richard Booth 2015.

We are delighted to share the news that one of the local diving clubs who have made significant contributions to this year’s SAMPHIRE project have also won an award for their excellent work on a wreck site just over the border at the Farne Islands.

Tyneside Branch 114 have won the 2015 British Sub-Aqua Club Wreck Award for their report on the Gun Rocks wreck site. Although this is not part of the SAMPHIRE project it is a great example of the type of collaboration the project aims to achieve and some of our team members had the privilege of assisting Tyneside with their work on the site as members of the Wessex Archaeology dive team. This report is a brilliant example of how local divers can draw on some of the specialist skills of maritime archaeologists to help bring new discoveries to light. We highly recommend that everyone has a read of the report which can be seen on the BSAC website here.

The Tyneside club have also been active in Scotland and have provided the SAMPHIRE project with fantastic data on the wreck of the Cathcartpark, a cargo ship wrecked near Iona in 1912. We will be providing full details of this shortly as we finalise our 2015 report which will be available to download here.

SAMPHIRE investigator John McCarthy gives an overview of the project to the workshop attendees - Photo by Hannah Smith

On Tuesday we went down to a marine heritage workshop at John Sinclair House in Edinburgh where we had the chance to give a brief presentation on the SAMPHIRE project as a example of the type of project generating data for the archaeological archives. The workshop was organised by with HES (Historic Environment Scotland) and MEDIN (the Marine Environmental Data & Information Network) with the aim of looking at the new role HES will be playing as a federated Historic Environment Data Archive Centre.

This is an area of major importance for marine heritage as it will help to ensure the future preservation of the data the communities on the west coast have helped us to generate. This will also make it easier for archaeologists and the public to access this data in the future.

Our colleagues in the English branch of WA Coastal & Marine have just announced that they have been awarded £92,400 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for an exciting project, Fishing Industry Protocol for Archaeological Discoveries: Establishing a Historic Environment Fisheries Liaison Officer. This project proposes the appointment of a Heritage Lottery Fund supported ‘Historic Environment Fisheries Liaison Officer’ (HEFLO) working in Sussex to engage with fishing communities to protect heritage. This project will help to carry out similar work to what we’ve been doing in Scotland as part of Project SAMPHIRE and should see lots of great discoveries and chances to participate in maritime heritage – See more at the Wessex blog post here.

We are now writing up our final report and we’ve taken a moment to update our map of all the blogs we’ve done over the years. After three years of archaeological fieldwork, community engagement and research as part of Project SAMPHIRE we have a total of over 85 blog entries! Why not explore the map to see what we have been up to. Our blogs are colour coded by year and include updates on diving, meetings with fishermen, talks at museums and exciting discoveries!

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Soon we will enhance this map with the new sites from our project database so stay tuned!

Ahead of the next week’s Archaeological Landscapes: Professional Skills fieldschool at Loch Torridon which is being run by our colleague Andrew Bicket in collaboration with Professor Karen Hardy, the SAMPHIRE project has had some previously unrecorded and very interesting wrecks reported to us at nearby Fearnmore. The initial discovery was sent to us by Karen herself who noticed a spread of wreckage amongst the kelp in the intertidal zone while revisiting some much older Mesolithic archaeological remains nearby. Karen is an expert on prehistoric archaeology but to understand these recent shipwrecks we have called on the assistance of the local community, in particular from our old friend, Shieldaig resident Robert Gordon and also from 75 year old Harris resident Hamish Taylor. Hamish spotted some photos we shared with the West Coast fishing boat group (Past & Present) on Facebook and got in touch to offer his expert advice. Hamish wrote:

‘In my upper teens (late 1950s) I spent five idyllic years in North Uist where I worked on small open fishing boats using most kinds of Kelvin Pet/Par engines (except the Kelvin Sleeve)and also occasionally on two twin screw Zulus, one with the 26/30 and 13/15 configuration and did just a couple of trips on a large Zulu with a 60 Poppet on the port side and a 26/30 on the starboard. The age of the Zulu was really past by then and these two boats Maggie Noble and Sickle must have been the last tremors of a dying breed. I got to know Kelvin Pet/Par engines and J and K diesels and their associated idiosyncrasies very well, but it was in the reflection of later and more mature years, away from boats and fishing that I really grew to understood and analyse the interaction of different kinds of boats and their combinations of engines. I retained a lifelong interest in marine engines of that age and still occasionally scan the internet just to gaze in admiration at the Kelvin Poppet, Riccardo and J & K diesels and Gardner diesels’.

Hamish was able to tell us the following about the wreckage in Karen’s photos: ‘the engine still vertical and attached to the frames looks to me to be a 13/15 Kelvin Poppet pertol/paraffin engine. It is offset to starboard, so the boat, probably a Zulu or a Fifie, was twin screw, The other engine lying on its port side looks like a 26/30 Poppet (double the 13/15), which would have been the port engine, and the flat plate uppermost was the mounting plate for the magneto. 26/30 to port and 13/15 to starboard was the usual confirguration. Both engines swung left-handed props, which meant that, particularly in a Zulu, the port engine was almost useless for manoeuvring so the smaller engine (on the starboard side) was used for manoeuvring and the larger engine added in when steaming. Occasionally one might see a Poppet engine on the starboard side and a Kelvin Riccardo (which swung a right-handed prop) on the port side, so either one could be used for manoeuvring… the spherical ball fragments were the water-cooled silencers, but I’m afraid I can’t identify the gear wheels unless they were part of a line-hauler – they certainly were not part of a standard Kelvin Poppet…’. Another old friend of the project, James Corrigall of Portree was able to add that ‘these gear wheels look like they were part of an iron man,they were used for hauling ground nets on the boats that worked the hake cod and coleys a good few year ago.’

We also contacted Robert Gordon as we knew he was familiar with the area from the work we had done with him around Chuaig Bay in 2013. This proved to be a good move as Robert was not only able to go to the site and take a further series of images but was able to make a probable identification of the wrecks and give a brief history of them.

Robert was able to tell us that locals believed the two wrecks to be the Queen and the Sally, the Queen being in better condition and having been put on the beach at the end of WWII while the Sally had been there longer. The Sally (registration TT13) was registered at Tarbert in Loch Fyne and was built in 1902 at Port Bannantyne. It’s deign was that of a Loch Fyne Skiff and it was fitted later with a Kelvin 7-9 hp in August of 1908,  later upgraded to a 8-10 hp model. We will continue to research these vessels in collaboration with locals so look out for more information in this year’s report!

We have recently been posting about scanning and 3D analysis of medieval Scottish galley carvings, undertaken by the SAMPHIRE maritime archaeology team. These carvings are in a remote area of Scotland and while we definitely recommend a visit to go and see them in person, for those who cannot we have uploaded interactive models so that you can explore the carvings in three dimensions using just your browser. By clicking on the images below you can rotate, zoom and pan around the stones and by clicking on the annotations you can access more information about particular areas of the carving. This will work in the most up to date version of most browsers but users of older versions of Internet Explorer may find that they need to implement an update before they can see the models.