Dredged Finds

Artifacts and ship timbers pulled up incidentally during navigation, aggregate, or maintenance dredging rather than by planned excavation. The Thames, Scheldt, and North Sea aggregate grounds have yielded prehistoric flint, faunal bone, anchors, and wreck fragments. Such finds lack archaeological context (stratigraphy and association are lost in the dredge), so they are recorded as stray finds. In England a dredged find of wreck material is reportable to the Receiver of Wreck under the Merchant Shipping Act 1995; aggregate operators run protocols to log and report material from the drag head.