Research project Historical guns – a life cycle perspective on a retrieved maritime heritage
Retrieved cannons have often attracted a significant interest.
They might help to identify a ship, provide knowledge of naval equipment and tactics, and be part of military collections highlighting the nations’ glorious past. Some of these cannons are the focus of this study.
Project description
By focusing on a limited set of cannons that at some point of their life cycle have received a great deal of interest from different actors, this subproject, within a larger resarch-program, will generate useful knowledge about the use of maritime cultural heritage in Sweden, from the mid-19th century onwards. As will follows, the subproject is part of the research programme’s heritage module.
The scope of the study stretches into the 20th century and the present time. Each of the included salvaging projects, regardless of their scale, have been closely knit to the best-known technical equipment of their time, starting with the diving bell and ranging to the sonar, the GPS, and the GPR.
The subproject studies the vast field of collaborations, motives, alliances between private and public agents, technology and medialisations that has arisen, and sometimes disappeared, around the cannons.
The larger research-programme is financed by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) and might be presented as follows, from the RJ-homepage:
"The multidisciplinary research program "The Lost Navy: Sweden’s ‘Blue’ Heritage c. 1450-1850" aims to explore, describe, and research this world of unique shipwreck material—compromising the entire range of sunken vessels from the sailing navy—from the perspectives of maritime archaeology, history, ethnology, and heritage studies. The research will draw on a combination of known but unexplored sources, including documents and artefacts from archives and museum collections as well as new and old archaeological findings, employing a novel “life cycle” perspective of ships concerned. While based at the multidisciplinary Centre for Maritime Studies (CEMAS), at Stockholm University the project will develop deep ties with Swedish Maritime and Transport Museums (SMTM)".
Project members
Project managers
Simon Ekström
Professor
More about this project
In progress. The project will be carried out at 20%, and some early results will be presented at conferences in 2022.