Every shipwreck they destroy disappears forever with all the stories of the peoples that thought, built, sailed, and lost it. This problem has been a major interest and research subject in the ShipLAB.Treasure hunting is a vile activity, as disgraceful as the destructions perpetrated by Islamic terrorists in the Middle East. This project started as a cooperation between the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University and the Centre for Marine Technology and Engineering, at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, and aims at creating better 3D models to explain the survey, recording, and reconstructing processes.Ī substantial portion of the world's submerged cultural heritage was destroyed in the last 50 years by treasure hunters. We believe that a combination of computer science, art, computer graphics, and the internet, are tools that can make archaeologists’ messages exciting, compelling and eloquent. As archaeology abandons its western biases and turns into a diverse and cosmopolitan discipline, practiced around by local archaeologists the world, we try to cooperate with other disciplines to create ways of sharing our data as widely as possible, in order to collectively address the main questions of anthropology: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? and What can we know?Īrchaeologists publish a small percentage (around 25%) of the sites they dig and thus destroy forever. In the ShipLAB we see archaeology as a source of ideas that may help us better understand the diversity of the human experience. Technological advance is changing archaeology rapidly, both becoming a more rigorous discipline, supported by an array of developing technologies, and moving towards more participated practices, divulging its discoveries to increasingly larger and more diverse publics. He has conducted field work in Portugal, Panama, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Italy, and Croatia, and his main interests are the history of wooden shipbuilding technology and European seafaring in the late medieval and early modern periods. He has a degree in civil engineering from Lisbon's Instituto Superior Técnico, a Master of Business Administration from the Catholic University of Lisbon, and a PhD in Anthropology from Texas A&M University. Mayer II Fellowship of Nautical Archaeology, and is the Director of the Ship Reconstruction Laboratory at Texas A&M University. It was considered unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski and Freud - among many others.”įilipe Vieira de Castro is Professor of Anthropology, holds the Frederick R. Hutchins, where science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge. “At the University of Chicago I also was lucky enough to go through a general education programme devised by Robert M. As an outreach institution we aim at providing in-formation, education, and guidance on the discipline of nautical archaeology and the importance of the world's submerged cultural heritage, perhaps more than ever threatened by treasure hunting. As a classroom our main objective is to provide an effective learning environment.Īs a research laboratory our objective is to facilitate investigation, seek public and private research funds, and recruit and retain quality students for our projects. Our mission is to acquire and disseminate knowledge about shipbuilding through time. Richard Steffy in 1976 and today is one of the laboratories of the Centre for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation of the Anthropology Department at Texas A&M University.