By Michelle Damian, ACUA Associate Member

The Museum of Underwater Archaeology (MUA; www.themua.org ) is a nonprofit, online-only museum founded in 2004. Our mission reads in part “to assist and promote the use of the Internet by ethical professional, student, and avocational underwater archaeologists.” To remind us all of what the internet was back then, 2004 was the same year that Facebook was launched. In the era before social media began to thrive, before WordPress and templates that help easily create websites, before smartphones, few archaeologists were web-savvy enough or had the time to promote their work online. We offered to facilitate getting the word out to the public for those researchers at no cost. Thus “Collaboration” became the MUA’s guiding principle, and as these various researchers provided their information, we incorporated it into the museum.

Over the following decades, the MUA has collaborated with dozens of universities, government organizations, avocational archaeology groups, CRM firms, and even other museums to produce over three hundred pages of content on underwater archaeological projects around the world. We offered various options for presenting that content: museum exhibits for an in-depth look at a site or project, project journals that real-time updates of individual or group fieldwork, “in the field” brief reports about shorter endeavors, and even a section for digital posters much as one might see at a conference.

All of those presentation options are still available through the MUA, but as more and more people have begun posting their project information on social media or their own websites, we have seen our role shift. Our newer initiatives have focused on three major endeavors: creating repositories for collections of materials such as conference proceedings, working directly with undergraduate students on research and presentation of their findings, and collaborating with multiple museums to create shared digital collections.

The conference proceedings initiative initially came about through our collaboration with the triannual Asia-Pacific Conference on Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage (APCONF). At the inaugural APCONF in Manila, 2011, organizers Mark Staniforth, Jun Kimura, and Bobby Orillaneda stipulated that they wanted something tangible to endure after the conference’s end, and so all participants were required to submit a written version of their paper presentations. These were printed as a hard copy, and also have been made available online via the MUA. Papers from subsequent APCONFs have also been collected in the online proceedings, resulting in over 350 papers on the maritime cultural heritage of the Asia-Pacific region. (https://apconf-much.org/proceedings/exhibits/show/apconf-muchproceedings) It is no exaggeration to say that this is the biggest English-language repository of scholarship on this subject. The MUA recently migrated the proceedings to a new server controlled by APCONF but will continue to edit and produce the proceeds for the foreseeable future.

Introductory page for the online Proceedings of the 2023 APCONF. Courtesy APConf.

The MUA has also been working closely with graduate and undergraduate students and classes to present their work online. Students from Georgia Southern University have created three storymaps using ArcGIS featuring aspects of coastal Georgia’s maritime history, ranging from the African-American maritime cultural landscape (http://www.themua.org/aamcl) to the oyster industry (http://www.themua.org/gaoysters), as well as a fourth storymap on piracy along the early North American coast (.https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/faf594e7a9604fdb967c4186d4a9d2dc

Storymap homepage for the Piracy and Governors from Georgia Southern University. Courtesy Georgia Southern University.

Monmouth College students worked with boat models from the Field Museum in Chicago as “proxy shipwrecks,” researching the types of boats and their construction to create a small exhibit from their findings (http://www.themua.org/Monmouth/ ). And finally, the MUA is in the process of creating another small exhibit with students from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. This group worked in conjunction with the Wisconsin Maritime Museum to research shipwreck artifacts in the museum’s collection.

Top page for the Monmouth College collaboration with the Field Museum. Monmouth.

The MUA has also begun its largest collaborative effort to date. Acknowledging that many museums have individual birchbark canoes, “Bark Canoes: A Digital Canoe Collection” (http://www.themua.org/barkcanoes) gathers information about each canoe under one digital umbrella. Researchers can see at a glance the wide range of canoes that are preserved in physical collections, providing the means to more easily study the cultures and construction techniques represented in museums across North America. While the collection continues to add new collaborators, currently thirty-six museums have contributed photos and information about nearly seventy individual canoes.

Map of contributing institutions for the Digital Canoes Collection.

Though the MUA’s focus has shifted over the years, we continue to believe that we are, simply, better together when we collaborate with the wider archaeological community. Being able to work with such a wide group of institutions and individuals has helped create one of the largest publicly available online repositories of information on maritime archaeology. Collaboration has allowed us to showcase the wide range of projects that have been carried out over the past two decades around the world. Surely the MUA’s role will continue to adapt in the years to come, but just as surely, collaboration will continue to be the key idea that allows us to grow.

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