ALSF Research Projects
ALSF Navigational Hazards Project
‘Mapping Navigational hazards as Areas of Maritime Archaeological potential’ is a GIS project which was commissioned by English Heritage and funded by the Aggregate Levy Sustainability Fund (ALSF). The project aim was to identify and characterise areas where a high potential for ship losses coincides with a high potential for preservation. The potential for ship losses was characterised using historical and environmental evidence of trends in natural navigational hazards.
There is an extensive archive available of historical sources such as nautical charts and pilotage documents produced from the Medieval period onwards. The project developed a method for identifying and characterising historically significant hazardous sea areas and presenting the information in a format which can be readily integrated into the process for better informing the assessment of archaeological potential.
The presence of archaeological material is also partly dictated by the nature of the marine environment and its potential for preserving archaeological materials in situ. An approach was therefore also developed to categorising seabed sediment types by their preservation qualities in order to identify areas where a high potential for loss coincides with a high potential for preservation. These areas identified as a result of this study represent the first steps towards the identification of Areas of Maritime Archaeological Potential (AMAP).
The results of the project highlighted the scope for further refining the assessment of archaeological potential through the integration of further environmental and archaeological datasets and the analysis of relationships between them. This led to the commissioning of a further ALSF project in 2007 entitled, “Refining Areas of Maritime Archaeological Potential for Shipwrecks – AMAP1”.
