Few scholars manage to create a thriving subdiscipline, especially in their own lifetimes, but such has been the accomplishment of Russell K. Skowronek and Charles R. Ewen. In the past two decades, these archaeologists have proved that despite the inherently evasive nature of pirates, the material traces of seafaring rogues are sufficient to sustain concentrated archaeological inquiry. The evidence supporting the subfield of pirate archaeology first accumulated in the form of an edited volume called X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy, which appeared in 2006.
From the start, it appeared that pirate archaeology would entail a “surf and turf” division, here split into “pirate lairs” and “pirate ships.” Some archaeologists have chased pirates with trowels, others with snorkels and spearguns (or, less romantically, vacuum hoses). Pirate lairs include the infamous Port Royal, Jamaica, whose 1692 earthquake turned turf to surf, and the less-known island of Roatán, on the north coast of Honduras. Here and in neighboring Belize, dyewood was gathered to be sent to Port Royal and then to London to be rasped and boiled by convicts. We forget that more than a few buccaneers deigned to cut logwood for “the man,” including William Dampier.
Pirate ships were more scattered, along with vessels described as “pirate prey.” In the Indian Ocean, Madagascar's St. Marie Island and sheltered bay were an obvious focus—Mauritius perhaps less so. Western Atlantic shores yielded the famous Ouidah (or Whydah), in the shark-infested waters off Cape Cod, and the Queen Anne's Revenge emerged from the muck of Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina. More miscellaneous finds and fancies appeared along the shores of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers of the United States. The editors end the first volume with reflections on pirates in fact and fiction, set against the barnacled or broken sherds dredged or dug up from the deep. Guns? Yes. Smoke? No. A first commandment was to be followed: let there be sequels.
Donny Hamilton's chapter about Port Royal ends with a fine treasure: the probate inventory of Henry Morgan (much silver, gold, and even emeralds, plus furniture, tools, 640 gallons of rum, a roster of enslaved and indentured men and boys, plus livestock including “a gang of dogg”). The old rum-soaked ex-buccaneer died in 1688–1689, about four years before the great quake, which must have turned him over in his grave. Joan Exnicios provides a chapter on the New Orleans smuggler and pirate fence Jean Lafitte (or Laffite) and his “lair at Grande Terre.” Sea-level rise and subsidence in coastal Louisiana have sunk it, along with much of Barataria Bay. J. D. McBride introduces us to Honduras's Bay Islands, focused mostly on the eighteenth century, and Daniel Finamore explains logwood in nearby Barcadares, Belize. Pirate utopia it was not.
Shifting to the Indian Ocean, Patrick Lizé offers a thorough overview of the excavation of the pirate ship Speaker, sunk off Mauritius in 1702. Coins, beads, cannon, and navigational instruments are illustrated and explained. John de Bry describes the search for William Kidd's ill-fated Adventure Galley, sunk near Isle-Ste-Marie, northeast of Madagascar. What comes up instead appears to be the Fiery Dragon, captained by Christopher Condent. Coins emerged under Discovery Channel lights that were too late for Kidd but just right for Condent. Chinese porcelain and other items also shone. Other pirate ships seemed made for TV, too.
Enter the celebrity vessel Ouidah, which raised ethical concerns for some (but it is a pirate ship!), as Christopher Hamilton explains. The wreck is now patrolled by great white sharks directed by the ghosts of Sam Bellamy and crew. Mark Wilde-Ramsing follows with another “star” vessel of less certain pedigree: Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge. Cannons came up, plus a concretion known as “Baby Ruth” (think, nougat and peanuts covered in chocolate), but nothing that screamed Blackbeard. Wayne Lusardi continues in this vein, but until the scent of smoking dreadlocks, it was just Wreck 31CR314.
Mark Wagner and Mary McCorvie challenge upper–Mississippi Basin pirate myths in a chapter called “Going to See the Varmint,” a call to pick up the banjo and hop the barge. But we are cautioned. In short, not all wrecked flatboats are wrecked pirate flatboats. Two final chapters treat pirate imagery and pop-culture references. Archived inventories, as in the chapter on Port Royal, may provide leads as to what one might find. Editors Skowrownek and Ewen round out the volume by pointing to places victimized by pirates, a new frontier—new “turf.”
We suspected a sequel was brewing, and in 2016, one appeared: Pieces of Eight: More Archaeology of Piracy. This one firmly established the archaeology of piracy as a viable niche within historical archaeology while also broadening its scope. There were more pirate ships to explore as well as new findings from older wrecks. We learned of Bartholomew Roberts's fabled Ranger, William Kidd's Quedagh Merchant, and (more about) Christopher Condent's Fiery Dragon. Newly found pirate lairs were fewer but promising in Cork County, Ireland. A victim of a pirate raid, Old Panama City (the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement along the Pacific coast of the Americas) got revisited too. Henry Morgan and his buccaneers did not take all, but much was lost to fire, and the city center moved. Other essays range from Hollywood obsessions to pirate self-esteem. Ewen ties it all together with a “parting shot,” reminding readers that this volume is about disambiguation, or how to make the “pirate/not-pirate” distinction in the dirt (or seabed). Or can one?
The 2016 volume starts with a chapter by Mark Wilde-Ramsing and Linda Carnes-McNaughton “proving” that Wreck 31CR314 is indeed the Queen Anne's Revenge, a former French slave ship from Nantes called La Concorde. The authors expand on the “French Connection” to Blackbeard, sealed by a pewter clyster whose services his low-fiber pirate diet may have demanded. Next is “Revisiting the Fiery Dragon” by John de Bry and Marco Roling. It reports on a 2010 partial excavation and wider reconnaissance of Pirate Bay, on Madagascar's Isle-Ste-Marie. Coins, statuettes, and Chinese export porcelain all suggest pirate booty, some likely taken from Portuguese sojourners. Chad Gulseth introduces Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts's Ranger, allegedly found near Jamaica's Port Royal in 1968 by Robert Marx. Gulseth suggests the Ranger is elsewhere in the vicinity—a nice tease (sequel!).
Frederick Hanselmann and Charles Beeker offer a similarly tantalizing chapter on William Kidd's Quedagh Merchant, scuttled near Catalina Island, Dominican Republic. Hull remains are teak, which is key, and there is evidence of Surat-style “rabbeting” of planks. Here also lie more than 21 “smoking” guns that point to Kidd—but not his fabled treasure. Meanwhile, the Dominican government won US aid (as in USAID) to designate a scuba-friendly pirate park (the Captain Kidd Living Museum in the Sea) in exchange for allowing scholars access to the hulk—a fine trade.
Henry Morgan's 1670–1671 sack of Panama is treated by the same Frederick Hanselmann, along with Tomás Mendizábal and Juan Martín. Here, as elsewhere in the volume, we get a lot of useful historical backstory prior to a report on archaeological findings. Although much has been recovered from the ruined and abandoned Old Panama over the years, this chapter is significant because it points to new opportunities in the waters of northern Panama, where Morgan launched the raid at the mouth of the Chagres River. There is now a Lost Ships of Henry Morgan Project, a reminder that attaching a famous pirate to a prospective site is sure to win funding (and provoke fighting).
As Connie Kelleher's subsequent chapter titled “Ireland's Golden Age of Piracy” suggests, the Long John Silver of today may in fact be the archaeologist out hustling institutions and private donors to back a “pirate dig.” Calling Squire Trelawney. Here, Treasure Island is the Leamcon “Pirate's Nest” (or lair) in County Cork, famous as hideout in the early seventeenth century. Who but pirates (or more likely, their coerced captives) would cut steps in a sea cliff?
Editors Ewen and Skowronek lead the remaining miscellany of chapters with one called “The Influence of Hollywood on the Archaeology of Piracy.” Inspired by the popularity of a certain movie franchise, this reflection urges archaeologists to go with the flow while also challenging pirate stereotypes with hard evidence. Next is a chapter by Heather Hatch on pirate flags, one by the late Kenneth Kinkor on pirate iconography appearing on artifacts, and one by Kathleen Deagan on contraband goods provided by pirates to Spanish settlers in St. Augustine, Florida. The upshot? If you can't beat ’em, join ’em—or at least buy their “merch.” Last is a chapter by Courtney Page and Charles Ewen on recognizing pirate shipwrecks using some of the cases treated above. There may not be a clear “pirate pattern” in the sand, but solid circumstantial cases can be made, and for the sake of funding, they must.
Volume three, Dead Man's Chest: Exploring the Archaeology of Piracy, appeared in 2023. New themes emerged, but the core was signaled by the title. Here, at the end of the trilogy, is a “chest” of dead men's (and women's) things—pirate material culture taken to the next level. The comedian George Carlin might have called this volume “Pirate Stuff,” with the understanding that not all was “pieces of eight.” A shipboard syringe (urethral or otherwise) might fascinate the discoverer, but the thought of using it would be horrifying.
The editors return to the scenes of the pirates’ crimes with their usual glee, cheered to find the scope of the field expanding and its legitimacy established. They are willing to acknowledge that piracy was not pretty in its day, but they embrace the ambivalence that keeps us interested in border-crossing baddies. I was reminded of David Graeber's posthumous book on pirates and their descendants in northeast Madagascar (Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), which strains against similar limitations in both evidence and perspective. Naughty as they were, we cannot help but root for the pirates—our outlaw alter-egos and projections, our inner Depps.
In time for volume three, new pirate lairs emerged in the Virgin Islands, Haiti (Tortuga Island), Cotinga in South Brazil (a new pirate shipwreck!), and along the Central American Miskito Coast. In the Indian Ocean, archaeologists continued to find pirate hangouts in Madagascar, and they returned to a wreck off Mauritius. As in volumes one and two, the “parting shot,” here written by Russell Skowronek, ties the book's diverse strands together. Pirate treasure has piled up.
Kimberly Kenyon updates work on Blackbeard's ship, which includes snippets of recovered text (a near miracle), along with a bosun's whistle one can almost hear. Jessie Craig and Michael Thomin offer a checklist of early nineteenth-century pirate paraphernalia and things to watch for, and Coy Idol and Katherine Thomas offer a critical look at pirate video games and what pirate “stuff” they get wrong. It may be too late to clean up Assassin's Creed. Jean Soulat takes pirate material culture global.
Three chapters on the greater Atlantic follow: Megan Rhodes Victor on New England “fishers of men,” Patrick Boyle on the lair of Lundy Island (off southwest England), and Bradley Rodgers and Jason Raupp on a possible pirate wreck at Morgan's Island, Somerset, Bermuda. Another five chapters treat sites in the Caribbean and “Terra Firma.” First is Kenneth Wild on the pirate geography of the Virgin Islands; Alexandre Coulaud, Nathalie Sellier-Ségard, and Martijn van den Bel on evidence of a pirate lair at Grand Case Bay, St. Martin (no smoking guns, just smoking pipes); and Laurent Pavlidis on Tortuga, the once and future pirate lair just north of Haiti, last reconnoitered in 1987. Next is Geraldo Hostin on a pirate wreck first excavated in 1963 near Paranaguá, in southern Brazil. Viva Cotinga! Last in the section is Lynn Harris on potential pirate wrecks near Cahuita, Costa Rica, and rogue ties to Miskito seafarers.
The book's final section before the “parting shot” treats lairs and wrecks in the Indian Ocean: John de Bry and Jean Soulat link archival and material traces to Isle-Ste-Marie lairs in Madagascar; Soulat returns with coauthors Yann von Arnim and Patrick Lizé in a chapter on the Speaker, the pirate wreck from Mauritius first excavated in 1979 and treated in volume one of this series; Skowronek's final chapter searches for a through line, sums up the state of the field, and reiterates some thoughts on ethical considerations in the archaeology of piracy.
Archaeologists of all sorts know the entanglements that bringing up “treasure” entails (even if that treasure is a button—or a clyster), and these entanglements have proved no less challenging for scholarly pirate hunters. Nota bene: beware the curse of Captain Flint.
And next? Who knows? A new tag team may emerge from the various crews now excavating pirate surf and turf, but Ewen and Skowronek have made their point: not only has “pirate archaeology” more than earned its keep since the duo embraced it in the 1970s, but this subfield and all the ambivalence it entails has also aided and broadened the historical approach to the material past. These volumes show that the “lens” of piracy—or peering into the past through a telescoping pirate looking glass—can humanize early modern world history in ways that textual sources cannot, or not by themselves. The whole ensemble of evidence must be read together to establish that piracy and pirates—like slavery and the slave trade, and so many things—were real and tangible phenomena. Their material traces attest to this. Skowronek and Ewen are to be congratulated for persevering and for encouraging younger scholars. In short, piracy is still good business, and Ewen and Skowronek have enriched it.
