Expert helps ID pieces of ships
DAYTONA BEACH — By identifying the different types of wood used, and some of the building methods employed, one local expert is helping others to narrow down the origin of a section of shipwrecked hull that washed ashore south of Ponte Vedra Beach in March.
“I don’t normally see this,” Lee Newsom said while holding up a small section of that ship’s frame. “I see a lot of oak in this position.”
The specimen in Newsom’s hand was American beech and she pointed out that the way it had been milled provided more clues.
“That’s the center of the tree,” she said. “You don’t normally do that either unless you are short on wood.” Newsom would know. Officially, she’s a professor of anthropology at Flagler College in St. Augustine, but her specialty and what she works most in is what she calls “environmental archaeology,” which is the study of plant-based materials at archaeological sites.
She studied at the University of Florida, where she earned her doctorate and eventually wound up at Penn State, which is where she was when she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.
“I stayed at Penn State for 15 years and retired early because I wanted to come back to Florida,” she said while standing in her small lab in downtown St. Augustine’s Government House surrounded by specimens from various projects.
Because she works in conjunction with arrangements through the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Department of Anthropology at UF she is involved in a lot of different work.
She rattled off some of the projects, veering into descriptions of each one with a healthy dose of enthusiasm.
There’s a Paleo-Indian site at Wakulla Springs, a Calusa site on Mound Key, a project in Cuba and even a small canvas bag of fossils that a local beachcomber brought in.
Though she works on all kinds of projects, Newsom, the granddaughter of a shipwright, said she has worked on more than 200 shipwrecks in her career and enjoys them.
She’s been back in Florida since 2016, and Chuck Meide, the director of maritime research at the St. Augustine Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, said her reputation in the field preceded her.
Meide is among the archaeologists who have been studying the Ponte Vedra shipwreck — often referred to now as the “Spring Break Wreck” — since it washed up on March 28.
It’s not the first time that Newsom has stepped in to help.
Meide, who has been at the lighthouse since 2006, knew that she had worked on some projects before he got there.
In the roughly two years since she has been back, he said, she’s been hard at work.
“I’d say at least six or seven wrecks that she’s helped us with or we are cataloguing now and about to hand over to her,” he said. “We couldn’t be happier that she’s here.”