Ship for Every Season

This Springerbrief determines the behaviors involved in construction, adaptation, discard, and salvage of the 1861 built double-ender ferryboat Waccamaw (ex. Nuestra Señora De Regla, ex. Commodore Hull, state ID: CFR0001), and examines how broader economic, social, technological, and environmental processes influenced these behaviors. This work offers a detailed material analysis of the original construction and modification of a vessel. This work analyzes the relevant historical documentation to understand the broader processes which influenced New York ferryboat construction and conversion into Union gunboats during the American Civil War. The Waccamaw site, its life history, and construction information is used to test the material effect of these processes which are brought to life by a three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the vessel at each stage of its use cycle. A scaled photogrammetric model of the vessel’s archaeological remains is displayed and integrated with the 3D reconstruction. Finally, relevant statistical information is juxtaposed with the vessel’s construction trends and contextual history to test the applicability of behavioral models of site formation, discard, and salvage in explaining the processes and behaviors which changed Waccamaw materially.The Waccamaw site, located in the Cape Fear River on the bank of Eagles Island adjacent to Wilmington, North Carolina, represents a promising opportunity to understand the intricacies of mid-19th century American riverine transportation technology and how this technology was used and reused. Furthermore, this vessel has a historical context that speaks directly to the processes of technological modification and the behavioral insights that can be derived from them. There are few studies, and even fewer published works, which address watercraft adaptation with an explicitly behavioral archaeological approach, an approach which considers the formation of an artifact or site starting with its original construction.