By Megan Likliter-Mundon
ACUA Board Member
Several ACUA members and organizations are featured in a new, traveling exhibit on underwater archaeology that was conceptualized, developed, and funded by the Intrepid Museum in New York City, and was developed and built by Flying Fish Exhibits. Intrepid Museum, housed aboard the WWII aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, values the links between history and archaeology and wanted to showcase a unique access point for their over 1 million visitors per year. “Mysteries from the Deep: Exploring Underwater Archaeology” opened on June 26, 2025 and ran through January 11, 2026 at its first venue. The next venue is the Virginia Museum of History & Culture from March 20, 2027 – Sept 6, 2027. The exhibit is a roughly 9000 square feet, immersive, bilingual (English and Spanish) experience designed to pull visitors into the mechanics, ethics, and human experience of studying and recovering history from the deep.
The exhibition’s scope extends well beyond what most visitors might expect. Yes, there are shipwrecks- but there are also aircraft, submerged Indigenous landscapes, ancient cities, and underwater cave systems. One of the exhibition’s central case studies is Pavlopetri, located off the coast of Greece and widely considered the oldest known sunken city. Another is Hoyo Negro, a flooded cave system in Quintana Roo, Mexico, where a 12,000-year-old skeleton nicknamed Naia was discovered. Her DNA has contributed meaningfully to scientific debates about the peopling of the Americas.
Visitors engage with these sites not just as passive observers but as active participants. An interactive touchscreen experience places them in the role of an underwater archaeologist navigating Hoyo Negro, tasked with documenting animal bones before their oxygen runs out. Another screen-based simulation lets visitors explore a digital reconstruction of the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, a dry land corridor beneath Lake Huron that rose above water roughly 9,000 years ago. In another, visitors choose which tool to help draw a site map of an underwater WWII aircraft. These interactive elements are not supplementary — they are central to how the exhibition conveys the intellectual and physical demands of the discipline.
The display also highlights the equipment that makes modern underwater archaeology possible: AUVs, ROVs, sonar imagery, historical and modern dive gear, and photogrammetry. The exhibit explains conservation techniques and preservation practices, as well as explains in situ preservation and monitoring. Artifacts on loan from institutions including the U.S. Naval Undersea Museum, Naval History and Heritage Command, Texas A&M University, and University of Michigan, among others.
The exhibit also houses artifacts and 3D printed models from number of shipwrecks, most notably the Monterrey ships off the coast of Texas, and Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive in the United States in 1860. The wreck wasn’t identified until 2019, when researchers working in near-zero visibility confirmed its identity through burned wooden planks and iron fasteners matching historical records.
I was proud to serve as the exhibit’s guest curator, and, as an underwater archaeologist and aviation specialist, help expand the scope to include all areas of underwater archaeology, as well as ensure rigorous technical detail.
A small focus of the exhibit was on my dissertation research, a WWII B-24 bomber Tulsamerican, downed in the Adriatic Sea in December 1944. Tulsamerican rests at approximately 42 m off the coast of Croatia and was documented in 2015, and excavated by Lund University in 2017. The exhibit discusses how in some cases excavation of military aircraft serves to recover evidence and remains of MIA personnel, and also illustrates the logistical challenges of deep-water excavation.
“Mysteries from the Deep” seeks to show that that what lies beneath the water’s surface is not simply wreckage- it is information, evidence, history, and in many cases, it is a story that links to living communities.
Categorised in: Deep Thoughts