Author plumbs the depths

One would think the heading "marine archaeology" was self-explanatory. So why must Carl Naylor spend much of his time clarifying one of the chief tasks of his employer, the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology?

"People seem to believe we have lots of resources and money to do our work, endless budgets and staff and equipment and boats," says the James Island resident, diving supervisor and archaeologist assistant for the institute's Maritime Research Division. "The reality is that we have to operate with no operating funds from the state at all. If we want to do a project, we have to find the money first, usually through a grant.

"The state pays our salaries and provides office space and vehicles, but that's it. There are just two staff members here from the institute, me and Ashley Deming, who is our archaeologist. Basically, we administer the portion of the Underwater Antiquities Act that relates to sport divers: licensing and education."

Naylor melds the technical with a sense of the human element in his first book, "The Day the Johnboat Went Up the Mountain: Stories From My Twenty Years in South Carolina Maritime Archaeology" (University of South Carolina Press), a title that suggests the vein of humor wound through the text.

"I've been working here 20 years, and a part of our education program is to give talks to dive clubs, divers and anyone who will listen," says Naylor, who will discuss his book today at 3 p.m. at Bethany Methodist Church in Summerville as part of the Timrod Library Lecture Series.

"Despite this, there is little public knowledge of marine archaeology in South Carolina. So I started writing about it, a few chapters of which started out as articles in our newsletter, The Legacy, years ago."

Naylor served as diving officer for the excavation of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley in 1996, but laments that apart from this well-publicized project, the public has scant knowledge of the Maritime Research Division's activities.

"It dawned on me that it would be a good idea to do a book, which took three years to write and another two years to get published. I've been writing all my life in one form or another, but what surprised me was how long it took to conduct the research," he says. "A lot of the technical details I put in the book were filed away in Columbia, and I spent lots of time digging through people's file cabinets and asking about people's recollections. So to refer to the book as a memoir, as some have, is misleading."

Naylor says his principal intent was to impart the human side of the equation.

"Most of the time our projects result in these dry and unreadable archaeology reports that I can't even understand. If I don't understand them, how's the public going to know what's going on? There are people involved in this, not just shipwrecks. Funny things happen. Human things. I wanted the book to have human interest at least equal to the archaeological interest."

From 1968-72, Naylor served in the Navy, part of a catapult crew on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, making three tours to the Mediterranean. He seldom even saw scuba gear.

Graduating from the University of South Carolina in 1975 with a degree in journalism, he invested three years as editor of The Manning Times and six more as editor of The Walterboro Press and Standard before following through on a childhood fascination.

Like many people of his generation, Naylor watched the TV series "Sea Hunt" as well as Jacques Cousteau specials. But it wasn't until he moved to Walterboro in the 1980s that he learned to dive. By 1985, he was a diving instructor.

The institute beckoned in 1986, when Naylor was brought aboard for a six-week project: the excavation of a Revolutionary War-vintage British gunboat that had sunk in the Cooper River.

"After that project, they told me they were starting a program monitoring coastal construction in Charleston and asked if I wanted a job. I went full time in 1987. When that program was abolished in the early '90s, I got shifted into what I'm doing now, which is working with the sport diving community. I hold the middle ground between the dive community and the professional community, which gives me access to both."

Today, Naylor is an instructor for the institute's underwater archaeology field-training class and is captain of its research vessels. He is keen to dismiss the notion that the lion's share of his work is out to sea.

"Another misconception is that most of what we do is offshore," Naylor says. "But our rivers in South Carolina are littered with archaeological sites of all types, mostly plantation vessels, including small sailing boats, dugout canoes (both historic and prehistoric) and the barges associated with rice culture.

"But what's so exciting about maritime archaeology today is the remote sensing gear that helps us find shipwrecks, gear that wasn't available to us before."

For information, go online at www.timrodlibrary.org and www.sc.edu/uscpress.