Port Royal, Jamaica Archaeology

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Archaeology - Preserved Sin City

Archaelogy - The Sunken Sin City

Marine or nautical archeology often provives a rare glimpse of the way things were at time of a catastrophe. It's as if time stops and is captured forever as in the case of shipwrecks (or mammoth mud slides and volcanoes) where people aren't given time to clean up. One such catastrophe that has helped nautical archeologists was the earthquake that destroyed part of the city of Port Royal, Jamaica. Once known as the "Wickedest City on Earth" for its sheer concentration of pirates, prostitutes and rum, Port Royal is now also considered to be the only sunken city in the New World.

On the morning of June 7, 1692, in a matter of minutes, a massive earthquake sent nearly 33 acres of the city -- buildings, streets, houses, and their contents and occupants -- careening into Kingston Harbor. Today, that underwater metropolis encompasses roughly 13 acres, at depths ranging from a few inches to 40 feet. It covers the area depicted by the red area on the photo to the right.

For many years, archaelogists, many of them students, have explored the buildings of this sunken colonial city, cataloging the artifacts and structures, encountering the remains of the human victims, and sorting through the detritus of everyday life.

"To me, it's like walking through your home town, I probably know more about these people who lived in 1692 in Port Royal than I do about my next door neighbor." Donny Hamilton, Institute of Nautical Archeology.

Per Donny Hamilton...

Port Royal belongs to an elite group of archeological sites that includes Pompeii and Herculaneum, Roman towns frozen in time by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. These sites are undisturbed; unlike most terrestrial sites, the archeologist is not bothered by debris from intervening human occupations. In submerged Port Royal, furniture, tableware, shoes, cooking implements, tools and anything else that might have been tucked away in a home or business remain largely in place.

The earthquake, "sealed in everything that was going on at 11:43 a.m. on June 7, 1692." The precise time is known because a pocket watch, its hands frozen at the instant of disaster, long before waterproof watches, was recovered during some of the first excavations of the site in 1960 by Edwin Link. The pinpointing in time of the disaster, says Hamilton, was a first for archeology.

"We are getting a glimpse of everyday life at a given point in time," Hamilton says, noting that while pieces of eight and royal treasure grab the public spotlight, what truly interests scholars is how the average citizenry lived, worked and played. A site like Port Royal is where the archeologist really "finds out about the ins and outs of everyday life."