Danish bronze cannon that was probably illegally salvaged from the wreck at Franska Stenarna in Nämdöfjärden. Photo: Oliver Lindkvist, the National Maritime Museum /SMTM.
Retrieved cannons have often attracted a significant interest. They might help to identify a ship, provide knowledge of naval equipment and tactics, and be part of military collections highlighting the nations’ glorious past. Some of these cannons are the focus of this study.
By focusing on a limited set of cannons that at some point of their life cycle have received a great deal of interest from different actors, this subproject will generate useful knowledge about the use of maritime cultural heritage in Sweden, from the mid-19th century onwards.
The scope of the study stretches into the 20th century and the present time. Each of the included salvaging projects, regardless of their scale, have been closely knit to the best-known technical equipment of their time, starting with the diving bell and ranging to the sonar, the GPS, and the GPR.
The subproject studies the vast field of collaborations, motives, alliances between private and public agents, technology and medialisations that has arisen, and sometimes disappeared, around the cannons.
This subproject is part of the research programme’s heritage module.
Historical guns – a life cycle perspective on a retrieved maritime heritage.
Project leader
Simon Ekström, ethnologist, Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University
E-mail: Simon.ekstrom@erg.su.se