ABOVE: Campanularia, a creeping hydroid, growing on delessaria, a red seaweed, which was in turn growing on an unidentified hydroid which formed the living substrate for other life forms over the deck at the prow of the Thesis. The interactions within the marine environment are complex.

The marine environment is archaeologically important because it can preserve artefacts and other materials associated with human activity. The focus of our work over the last fifteen years has been on these material remains. Initially our interest was in how to conserve artefacts after they had been excavated. Unfortunately this is a very expensive option, and can only be carried out for a very small percentage of sites.

Given the problem with conservation it was natural to transfer our research effort to studying how to manage and preserve sites within the marine environment. This is proving a challenging, but also very rewarding area of work. The holistic approaches described here encompass artefact monitoring within a broader environmental monitoring regime. Our objective is to explore the site on a range of levels, and attempt to understand it as an integral part of the marine environment.

Unfortunately shipwrecks and other submerged sites can only be visited by a tiny percentage of the population. If we are not going to excavate the site and put it in a museum, how can we explain the impact of a site to people who will never visit it? To try to overcome this problem we have been actively developing a number of web formats in conjunction with the NAS, and previously with the Archaeological Diving Unit (ADU).

Here we have used the 3D VRML format to permit exploration of a few of the sites we have been studying. The VRML format is helpful for us in trying to understand a site. Underwater our field of vision is very greatly reduced, such that only a small area of the site is visible at any one time. Virtual models are a cheap but effective means for studying a site in its entirety. While the format is not ideal, with a little practice you do get some of the freedom to explore shipwrecks and other sites in three dimensions, which is perhaps not too dissimilar to the experience a diver might enjoy in conditions of perfect visibility.

In addition we make extensive use of the FLASH format. Unlike VRML, FLASH is available as a standard on most web browsers, so it is easily accessed. FLASH is not a 3D environment; however, so we are obliged to interpret the site we are describing. In describing sites we have tried to avoid forcing visitors to view a one-dimensional story line - our objective is to allow you to explore our work and draw your own conclusions.