Interviews
Our ‘10 questions in 5 minutes’ with leading researchers, academics, and authors in the fields of history and archaeology.
Daniel Pascoe
Dan is a maritime archaeologist specialising in the investigation of shipwrecks, particularly Royal Navy warships and the development of naval gunnery. Dan directs his own business, Pascoe Archaeology, where he is currently investigating several sites on the Goodwin Sands. He has worked with some of the main organisations in UK maritime archaeology including the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology, the Mary Rose Trust, and Wessex Archaeology.
Dan is also working as a part time research fellow for Bournemouth University conducting excavation and post-excavation work on the 74-gun warship, the HMS Invincible - a large mid-18th century wooden warship, which wrecked off Portsmouth, England in 1758.
You can find out more about Dan and his work here:
Facebook: Invincible Wreck Site
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1. What inspired you to be involved in your area of expertise?
My Dad, teaching me to dive as soon as I was old enough and then taking me diving on shipwrecks in the Western Isles and Orkney. It was on one diving trip to North Ronaldsay, the most northern Orkney Island, when completely by chance I found a human skull in the garden of the croft we were staying at. It turned out the croft was built next to a kist and it had been disturbed during building work. From that experience I couldn’t help but get into archaeology, but it was the fascination with the underwater world that drew me to marine archaeology.
2. What do you like most about your field?
The adventure of the underwater environment, the darker and murkier the better because the greatest preservation and therefore the richer the archaeology can occur in the least hospitable locations for an archaeologist.
3. How did you get involved in your field of study/research?
I always knew I wanted to be a marine archaeologist and one that gets to spend as much time underwater as possible. So as soon as I finished my undergrad degree at Southampton, I travelled up to Fort William on the west coast of Scotland to do my commercial diving qualifications. Within two years I was excavating the bow of the Mary Rose, alongside all the archaeologists and the ship I had learned so much about during Jon Adams’ undergrad modules. It was an amazing time and one I will never forget, and there began my interest in wooden warships.
4. What book, website, or other resource would you recommend to new students of H/AH/ARCH?
Check out the Virtual Diver Trail of the wreck of the 74-gun warship, Invincible, that wrecked in 1758. It tells the story of the ship from construction through to discovery and subsequent archaeological investigations up to 2017.
Between 2017 – 2019 another phase of excavation was undertaken and the main events were recorded through a series of short films, which can be found on the Project Website.
5. What book, website, or other resource do you think is possibly the best you have ever found?
For someone interested in shipwrecks of the Royal Navy, The National Archives at Kew in London is the first stop for any researcher. You can find a wealth of naval documents which hold critical information relating to the construction, the service career and wrecking events of hundreds of ships. The records provide rich information to support the archaeological evidence and help you understand the relationship between the archaeological and historical record.
6. Can you mention one or two emerging themes you have observed in H/AH/ARCH?
What we often find is that the marine environments are so dynamic that it can be difficult to keep up with the rates of change we see on shipwrecks, so we need to be constantly developing ways to be more proactive in our approaches. One way of doing this, and an emergent theme in site management, is regular monitoring surveys using seabed mapping and rapid underwater digital recording techniques. These allow us to better understand when and how these sites are going to expose and be lost, leading hopefully to a proactive rather than reactive stance and enabling us to act before the inevitable happens.
7. What advice would you give someone starting out in H/AH/ARCH?
For those that want to work on underwater sites, this environment can be challenging, with poor visibility, strong tides and currents etc. To deal with these challenges I recommend diving as much as possible, so the act of diving becomes second nature, enabling you to focus on the archaeology rather than just staying alive.
8. If you could meet any historical figure who would it be and why?
Actually, it would be two brothers, John and Charles Dean, inventors of the standard diving helmet. With their invention they salvaged many shipwrecks during the 1820s and 30s including the Mary Rose and the 100-gun Royal George off Portsmouth. I would ask what it was like to dive on those shipwrecks, how much of the Mary Rose was sticking out of the seabed of the muddy Solent and what was it like to clamber along the decks of the Royal George.
9. Which era or time period would you like to visit?
For me it has to be the Tudor period because of the Mary Rose. This is when we see a transition in naval warfare, brought on in part by the introduction of watertight lidded gunports, allowing heavy ordnance to be fired at range from just above the waterline with hull smashing capabilities. This was occurring alongside the more traditional method of coming along side and using a variety of close range anti-personal weapons, like long bows and breech loading swivel guns.
10. Do you have a favourite historical quote, if so what is it?
If 1970s film quotes count, Chief Brody from the film Jaws:
“You’re going to need a bigger boat”