Earlier this week, I visited Odyssey Marine Exploration's exhibit, SHIPWRECK! Pirates and Treasure at the AAM-accredited Discovery Place in Charlotte, North Carolina. The next day, I visited the North Carolina Maritime Museum, a member of the Council of American Maritime Museums, in Beaufort to see their exhibit on the excavation of the Queen Anne's Revenge, the former flagship of the notorious pirate Blackbeard.
SHIPWRECK! is a relatively recently created exhibit and has toured museums in Oklahoma City, Tampa, and Detroit. It contains artifacts from Odyssey's excavations of the SS Republic, the "Blue China" wreck, and an unnamed wreck found near Tortugas. The exhibit opens with a number of artifacts from the above mentioned wrecks on display, followed by a series of interactive video screens on which visitors can watch short films about a variety of shipwreck excavations. In these videos, information about the shipwrecks excavated by Odyssey and other commercial salvage groups is interspersed with sites excavated by archaeological groups, like the wreck of the Uluburun wreck, which was excavated by George Bass and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in the 1980s and now forms the basis of the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Turkey. One video screen is dedicated to the HMS Sussex, and emphasizes the need to recover Sussex's cargo of "money" and the agreement between Odyssey and Great Britain.
After this section, the visitor moves into a theater in which a video about Odyssey's excavation of the Republic is played. The video describes Odyssey's process of researching, targeting, and excavating wrecks. Near the end of the video, Odyssey CEO Greg Stemm reveals that, while the most rare or valuable artifacts are kept in Odyssey's collection, the rest will be sold to the public.
The next gallery is a large space dedicated to the technology used by Odyssey on their excavations; a large model of Odyssey's ROV dominates the center of the rooms, and the walls are lined with a number of interactive games based on operating ROVs, magnetometers, side-scan sonars, and the challenges presented by weather. Commercial salvors' focus on technology was an issue raised by archaeologist Tatiana Villegas Zamora in a 2008 article in Museum International. Zamora observed that the technology required for deep-ocean exploration and excavation has developed more quickly than the public's appreciation of underwater cultural heritage and that, "as a result, the public is far more aware of technological developments than of the importance of the sites themselves." Though a part of this gallery was used to tell the story of the Republic, and the adjacent gallery was filled with artifacts recovered from the wreck site, the overwhelming emphasis was on the technological prowess of Odyssey.
Leaving this gallery, the visitor then travels into a smaller, square gallery. Along the walls of this gallery are cases containing personal artifacts from the Republic, including glass bottles and other personal artifacts. In a rather innovative approach, each of these cases is paired with an interactive video screen on which visitors can choose to listen to audio-labels for the artifacts in the cases. In the center of this gallery is an exhibit on the coins raised from the Republic. The coins are displayed in plastic coin display cases of the type used by coin collectors. The choice to display them in these cases puts them in the context of commercial collector's items, not artifacts.
The final portion of the exhibit is a gallery focused on the history of pirates and piracy. Most of the components of this exhibit are interactive activities based on learning about pirate flags, ships, and other aspect of pirate life. The walls are painted with cartoon-like renderings of swashbucklers and seems aimed toward a younger audience. On the day of my visit, it was the most popular gallery in the exhibit, possibly due to the fact that Discovery Place is a science center popular with younger audiences and family groups.
At the end of the exhibit, as with the end of many exhibits, the visitor finds themselves in the museum's gift shop. Here they are offered the opportunity to purchase artifacts raised from the Republic, including coins (in the same collector's cases as the coins on display), bottles, and jewelry crafted from recovered glass shards, all paired with certificates of authenticity.
Overall, it was not hard to see why the exhibit could be popular with visitors and museums. The interactive games were engaging and were fairly effective in demonstrating the educational points Odyssey was trying to make. The final, pirate gallery was hokey, but appeared to be well-liked. Nonetheless, the obvious focus was on technology first, with plenty of mentions of Odyssey's interest in archaeology, and on "treasure." The commercial aspect of Odyssey's operations was made especially apparent by the artifact sales in the museum store.
Look for a comparison of this exhibit to the approach taken by the North Carolina Maritime Museum soon...
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