Dead Man's Chest: Exploring the Archaeology of Piracy

Featuring
discussions of newly discovered evidence from South America, England, New
England, Haiti, the Virgin Islands, the Caribbean Sea, and the Indian Ocean, Dead Man's Chest presents diverse
approaches to better understanding piracy through archaeological
investigations, landscape studies, material culture analyses, and documentary
and cartographic evidence.

The case
studies in this volume include medieval and post-medieval piracy in the Bristol
Channel, illicit trade in seventeenth-century fishing stations in Maine, and the
guerrilla tactics of nineteenth-century privateers and coastal bandits off the Gulf
of Mexico Coast. Contributors reveal the story of a Dutch privateer who saved a
ship from a storm only to take control of it, partnerships between pirates and
Indigenous inhabitants along the Miskito coast, and new findings on the Speaker--one of the first pirate ships to
be archaeologically investigated--in Madagascar.

As well as covering shipwrecks and other topics
traditionally associated with piracy, several chapters look at pirate
facilities on land and cultural interactions with nearby communities as
reflected through archival documentation. As a whole, the volume highlights
various ways to identify piracy and smuggling in the archaeological record,
while encouraging readers to question what they think they know about pirates.