Dutchman Out of His Depth

Digs & Discoveries November/December 2013

(Courtesy Bournemouth University)
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 Archaeologists excavating a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ship off southern England have recovered a 30-foot-long oak rudder decorated with a Baroque carving of a mustachioed man. Bournemouth University’s David Parham first saw the carving while surveying the wreck. “It was a shock,” he says. “Usually in archaeology you only encounter skeletal remains of people. But this carving had to have been modeled on a real person. Here I was looking at him face to face. He struck me as looking mournful.” 

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