Examination of Witnesses (Questions 176-179)
10 DECEMBER 2003
MR ROBERT
YORKE, MR
GEORGE LAMBRICK,
MR DAVID
MILES AND
MR IAN
OXLEY
Q176 Chairman: Welcome, gentlemen, to
the Committee. For the record, we have Mr Bob Yorke, who is described
here as the chair of the Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee.
Mr Yorke: That is correct.
Chairman: Mr George Lambrick, the director
of the Council for British Archaeology, welcome. Mr David Miles,
the chief archaeologist of English Heritage and Mr Ian Oxley,
the head of Maritime Archaeology, English Heritage. You are all
very welcome indeed.
Q177 Joan Ruddock: Obviously we have
had written evidence from you and you mentioned the Mary Rose
in the submission[1].
I wonder if you can give us a few more examples and flesh out
what exactly you regard as being the underwater cultural heritage?
Mr Yorke: The historic remains
of both ships and submerged land surfaces are time capsules of
our past. More importantly, a lot of the organic material is far
better preserved than ever found on land. If we refer to the Mary
Rose, which you may well have visited, you will have seen long
bows. Long bows have never been found on land in England but they
have been found on the Mary Rose, not just one or two of them,
but boxes of them. They have been preserved and Robert Hardy has
done some experimental archaeology on them to see how well they
work. That is one example but there are a number of others, obviously.
Q178 Joan Ruddock: If you quantify it
in any way, what volume of stuff do you think is down there?
Mr Oxley: In the national monuments
records of the UK in the four home countries we have 58,000 records.
42,500 of those are in England alone, so we have an indication
of what is there but that is not to say that we know exactly what
all of those records mean, or their importance or significance
or the threats that those sites may be under.
Q179 Joan Ruddock: Can you give us some
idea of how much you know about the underwater cultural heritage?
Mr Oxley: That is the difficulty.
We know about those fairly small numbers by extrapolating from
where we know those records have come from in the last couple
of centuries of fairly well known or documented wrecks and casualties.
We know that since the Neolithic we have been using the sea and
our indication is that there may be many hundreds of thousands
of actual sites there.
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