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The ArchivesSourcesModern Archaeological Reports

Modern Archaeological Reports

The modern excavation, survey and conservation literature of golden-age-related sites, running from the late 1950s to the present and covering North Carolina's numbered Queen Anne's Revenge report and bulletin series for site 31CR314, the privately financed Whydah project in Massachusetts, the Port Royal programme in Jamaica and the permit-driven files of the 1715 Spanish plate fleet wrecks off Florida.

Fromlate 1950sAlso writtenQueen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project Research Report and Bulletin Series; QAR report series; Site 31CR314 reports; Whydah project literature; Port Royal excavation reports; 1715 fleet permit files; Underwater archaeology grey literature

This cluster holds no period documents. It is the modern paper trail around four site complexes whose remains bear on piracy between 1690 and 1725: the Whydah Gally, lost off Wellfleet in Massachusetts in 1717 and reported located in 1984; the Beaufort Inlet wreck, site 31CR314 in North Carolina, found on 21 November 1996 by Intersal, Inc. under state permit and identified by the state as Queen Anne's Revenge, lost in 1718; Port Royal in Jamaica, sunk by the earthquake of 7 June 1692; and the wrecks and salvage camps of the Spanish plate fleet lost off Florida in 1715. Reporting runs from the late 1950s to the present.1

Form follows jurisdiction. North Carolina holds title to the Beaufort Inlet wreck and worked it through the Underwater Archaeology Branch of its Office of State Archaeology, building a numbered public series as it went: the Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project Research Report and Bulletin Series, with report codes such as QAR-R-09-02 and bulletin codes such as QAR-B-07-03, free online. Conservation, artefact-class and historical-background reports were issued separately, so a finding about the ceramics and a finding about the ship's history each come from a different dated and coded report.2

Massachusetts appears to have produced no comparable numbered series. The Commonwealth claimed the Whydah, and on 12 December 1988 the Supreme Judicial Court held in Commonwealth v. Maritime Underwater Surveys, Inc. that the federal admiralty law of finds applied and vested title in the discoverer. The excavation was privately financed and is reported through a general-readership monograph, Barry Clifford with Paul Perry, Expedition Whydah (1999), museum display and edited volumes. The identification is the cluster's strongest: a ship's bell reads THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716, though its recovery in the autumn of 1985 rests on a single secondary account.3

Jamaica reports through conference papers, syntheses and theses. Port Royal has been worked since Edwin Link's expedition, dated 1956 in one account and 1959 in another, and systematically from 1981 under Donny L. Hamilton for the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Texas A and M University and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, on Lime Street at its High Street and Queen Street intersections. Some thirteen hectares of a town of about twenty-one sank in 1692.4

Florida generates consent contracts and permit files under Chapter 267 of its statutes. Exclusive salvage rights to the 1715 wreckage are reported to have passed to a commercial company in 2010.5

The identification question

The Beaufort Inlet wreck has no inscribed object: its bronze bell is dated 1705 and carries no ship's name, so the case rests on location relative to a documented loss, wreck-scatter size, assemblage character and the chain of documents back to the Nantes slaver La Concorde. It was challenged by Bradley A. Rodgers, Nathan Richards and Wayne Lusardi in "Ruling Theories Linger": Questioning the Identity of the Beaufort Inlet Shipwreck, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 34, number 1, 2005, pages 24 to 37, and defended by Mark U. Wilde-Ramsing and Charles R. Ewen in Beyond Reasonable Doubt: A Case for Queen Anne's Revenge, Historical Archaeology 46, number 2, 2012, pages 110 to 133. The identification of Blackbeard's flagship is strongly supported and circumstantial; the dispute is on the record.6

Its limits as evidence

Provenance is the standing objection. Ricardo J. Elia, in The Ethics of Collaboration: Archaeologists and the Whydah Project, Historical Archaeology 26, number 4, 1992, pages 105 to 117, argued that professional participation in commercially financed salvage breaches the conservation ethic and imperils curation. The audit trail is asymmetric. North Carolina's series is dated, numbered and downloadable; the Whydah field record is not published as an equivalent technical series, and no final excavation report for it is retrievable. Human remains were announced from the site in 2018 and 2021; no peer-reviewed osteological or genetic report for either announcement is retrievable.7

How the Archive uses it

Archaeology supplies what the trial print and the printed narratives cannot: assemblage. Guns actually mounted, ceramics actually used, ballast, trade goods and personal effects, independent of the narrative tradition and able to test it. The Archive cites the report code rather than the press release, gives the identification basis with the identification, and records where a project has published no site report. Port Royal is a 1692 assemblage, evidence for the port economy pirates drew on rather than golden-age piracy, and no excavated 1715 object has been tied to the salvage-camp raid that seeded the New Providence company.

What this source cannot yet give is an auditable record for the site that matters most to pirate history: no final excavation report for the Whydah is retrievable, whether unpublished field records may be consulted is unknown, the artefact totals quoted for it rest on publicity rather than a published inventory, and no Florida Master Site File numbers were obtainable, those numbers being restricted in state practice.

What the evidence does not settle

Whydah excavation report

  • Whether unpublished Whydah field records exist is unknown

1715 fleet material association

  • 1715 wreck material's link to the 1716 salvage-camp raid is unclear

Whydah human remains identification

  • The 2018 Whydah DNA identification has no peer-reviewed reportVery likely
  • The 2021 six-skeleton recovery lacks a peer-reviewed reportVery likely

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. The Beaufort Inlet wreck, site 31CR314 in North Carolina, was located on 21 November 1996 by Intersal, Inc. operating under permit from the state, and is identified by North Carolina as Queen Anne's Revenge, lost in 1718, a determination made in 2011 on cumulative rather than single-artefact evidence and carried as Highly Probable on the Archive's record of the ship. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Modern archaeology, project website: Blackbeard's Shipwreck Discovered, Queen Anne's Revenge Project, NC Office of State Archaeology, qaronline.org (SRC015-001)
  2. North Carolina publishes the work at 31CR314 as a numbered public series, the Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project Research Report and Bulletin Series, free online and with conservation, artefact-class and historical-background reports issued separately under codes such as QAR-R-09-02 and QAR-B-07-03. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Modern archaeological report series: Mark Wilde-Ramsing, Historical Background for the Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Site, QAR-R-09-02, August 2009 (SRC015-003); Linda Carnes-McNaughton, Brick and Tile from 31CR314, QAR-B-07-03, 2007 (SRC015-005)
  3. Title to the Whydah, reported located in 1984, was vested in its discoverer rather than in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by the Supreme Judicial Court on 12 December 1988, and the wreck is identified by an inscribed ship's bell reading THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716 whose recovery in the autumn of 1985 rests on a single secondary account. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Law report and modern archaeology: Commonwealth v. Maritime Underwater Surveys, Inc., Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, 12 December 1988, 403 Mass. 501, 531 N.E.2d 549 (SRC015-011); Underwater Explorer Proves Wreck is Whydah, Mass Moments, Mass Humanities (SRC015-010)
  4. Port Royal, Jamaica, sank in the earthquake of 7 June 1692, losing about thirteen hectares of a town of about twenty-one hectares, and has been excavated systematically from 1981 under Donny L. Hamilton for the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Texas A and M University and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, on Lime Street at its intersections with High Street and Queen Street. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Modern archaeology, conference and heritage-risk paper: Donny L. Hamilton, Port Royal, Jamaica: Archaeological Past and Development Potential, ICOMOS, Underwater Cultural Heritage at Risk, 2006 (SRC015-018); Port Royal Harbor Excavation, Institute of Nautical Archaeology (SRC015-017)
  5. Florida administers the 1715 plate fleet wrecks through consent contracts and permit files under Chapter 267 of the Florida Statutes, and exclusive salvage rights to the 1715 wreckage are reported to have passed to a commercial company in 2010. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Regulatory guidance and press analysis: Laws, Underwater Archaeology, Florida Division of Historical Resources, Department of State (SRC015-020); Florida coin hoard worth $1m resurfaces debate over treasure hunting, The Art Newspaper, 30 January 2026 (SRC015-022)
  6. The bronze bell from 31CR314 is dated 1705 and carries no ship's name, so the identification rests on location relative to a documented loss, wreck-scatter size, assemblage character and the documentary chain back to La Concorde of Nantes, a case contested in print in 2005 and defended in 2012. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Modern archaeology, fact sheet and peer-reviewed articles: Queen Anne's Revenge Fact Sheet, Queen Anne's Revenge Project (SRC015-002); Bradley A. Rodgers, Nathan Richards and Wayne Lusardi, 'Ruling Theories Linger': Questioning the Identity of the Beaufort Inlet Shipwreck, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 34(1), 2005, pages 24 to 37 (SRC015-007); Mark U. Wilde-Ramsing and Charles R. Ewen, Beyond Reasonable Doubt: A Case for Queen Anne's Revenge, Historical Archaeology 46(2), 2012, pages 110 to 133 (SRC015-006)
  7. Professional criticism of archaeological collaboration with commercially financed salvage was set out by Ricardo J. Elia in The Ethics of Collaboration: Archaeologists and the Whydah Project, Historical Archaeology 26, number 4, 1992, pages 105 to 117, which argues that such participation breaches the conservation ethic and imperils permanent curation. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Peer-reviewed archaeology: Ricardo J. Elia, The Ethics of Collaboration: Archaeologists and the Whydah Project, Historical Archaeology 26(4), 1992, pages 105 to 117, citation verified via aggregator rather than against the journal (SRC015-012)