De-particularizing the particular: approaches to the investigation of well-documented post-medieval shipwrecks

Post-medieval shipwrecks are rich repositories of archaeological evidence with closed and closely integrated contexts. Their value is often enhanced by extensive documentary material. Viewed on its own terms, such evidence, though often of great interest, can lead to an over-particularist approach. Set into wider contexts, however, shipwrecks can be regarded as wide-ranging paradigms of the societies to which they belong, and approaches to their study directed accordingly. This paper seeks to demonstrate the benefits of combining particularist and generalist methodologies to the investigation of shipwrecks, with reference to the study of artillery, measuring techniques, and pottery from wrecks of the 1588 Spanish Armada, and of structural evidence from the wreck of a small seventeenth-century AD English warship.