Buried ship found at World Trade Center site

CrystalGeezer

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latimes.com

Buried ship found at World Trade Center site

Construction workers unearth the hull of a vessel that archeologists say was probably buried in the 18th century as landfill. An anchor is found nearby.

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

10:09 PM PDT, July 14, 2010

NEW YORK


Workers excavating at the World Trade Center site have unearthed the 32-foot-long hull of a ship probably buried in the 18th century.

The vessel probably was used along with other debris to fill in land to extend lower Manhattan into the Hudson River, archeologists said.

Archeologists Molly McDonald and A. Michael Pappalardo were at the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Tuesday morning when workers uncovered the artifacts.

"We noticed curved timbers that a backhoe brought up," McDonald said Wednesday. "We quickly found the rib of a vessel and continued to clear it away and expose the hull over the last two days."

The two archeologists work for AKRF, a firm hired to document artifacts discovered at the site. They called Tuesday's find significant but said more study was needed to determine the age of the ship.

"We're going to send timber samples to a laboratory to do endocrinology that will help us to get a sense of when the boat was constructed," said McDonald, who added that a boat specialist was going to the site Thursday to take a look at the ship.

The workers and archeologists also found a 100-pound anchor in the same area on Wednesday, but they're not sure if it belongs to the ship.

The archeologists are racing to record and analyze the vessel before the delicate wood, now exposed to air, begins to deteriorate.

"I kept thinking of how closely it came to being destroyed," Pappalardo said.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
 
sure, that makes sense. what was left of the actual structure is hauled off under armed guard and sent to India to be melted down, but some old ship found on the site will be carefully studied.
 
I don't know if they plan to preserve the ship or not. An article in yesterday's New York Times said that the ship discovery will not be allowed to delay the construction schedule, so archeologists descended on the site en masse and were frantically trying to glean all the info they could.

While the design for the new World Trade Center is very sleek and modern, I kinda wish they had just recreated the Twin Towers. It would've been our way of saying "Suck it, Osama" writ large.
 
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