Fun with Science Club®


			Can snail shells tell archaeologists where a ship has been? Carrie Straight 05.14.01 Archaeologists have to use many different techniques to put the puzzles together to make discoveries about ancient humans. One technique they use to help put pieces of these puzzles together is to look at things associated with an archaeological dig. For example, from a shipwreck archaeologists can look at land snails attached to the ship. If the snail is not native to the area where the ship sank, then perhaps it was part of the original “cargo” If not part of the original cargo, such snails may be important clues to where a ship traveled. The difficulty for archaeologists is deciding what was originally on board the ship. The snails could have been blown over from the mainland and just happened to land on the ship. Thus, archaeologists must be careful to investigate all possible sources of the snails. The archaeologists collected snail shells from a shipwreck site near Turkey and from the land surrounding the area where the shipwreck occurred. They then compared the ancient shipwrecked snails to their living land neighbors. They measured many different characteristics of the snail shells. Some of the snails were definitely not on board the ship when it sank. They were new, and didn’t have a lot of encrusted stuff on them. Because of similarities in size and shape, the other snail shells on the shipwreck were also probably not on board when the ship sank, but were from land areas near the wreck.


			Welter-Schultes, F. W. 2001. Land snails from an ancient shipwreck: the need to detect wreck-independent finds in excavation analysis. Journal of Archaeological Science 28: 19-27.