Underwater Archeology in the FL Panhandle - EP. 02

In this episode, Ryan catches up Shawn Joy – a remarkable underwater archeologist and a truly unique dude. They talk about his recent work that’s helped redefine the modern world's understanding of our earliest cultures and civilizations, the boats he uses to support his expeditions, and much, much more. 

Follow along at youtube.com/boattrader

Transcript

00:00:01:01 - 00:00:29:03
Announcer
From the Cracked Boombox speakers on Grandpa's old skiff, the dockside gym boxes and the ultra high fidelity sound systems of today's luxury yachts, however you listen to your favorite shows. This is the Stomping Ground podcast by boat trailer. No matter where you are locked on land or cruising topside, we're bringing you stories from real boaters all across America who show us why they love their boat and what makes it the perfect vessel for their neck of the woods.

00:00:30:02 - 00:00:56:21
Ryan McVinney
Hello, I'm your host, Ryan McVinney, and welcome to Boat Trader's Stomping Grounds Podcast. This is the sister podcast to our popular video series about boating culture across America. Each podcast episode delves a bit deeper into a topic from the original video episode and features an in-depth interview with an expert in the field. You can find a link to today's matching video episode in the YouTube description for podcast show notes.

00:00:56:21 - 00:01:27:22
Ryan McVinney
And if you're listening via podcast, just know that you can always check out the video version of today's episode on our YouTube channel. YouTube.com Slash Boat Trader. I'm excited to share my conversation with my good friend Sean Joy, a remarkable underwater archeologist and a truly unique dude. We talk about his recent work that's helped redefine the modern world's understanding of our earliest cultures and civilizations and the boats that he uses to support his expeditions, plus much, much more.

00:01:28:03 - 00:01:29:11
Ryan McVinney
So let's sit down with him and catch up.

00:01:30:15 - 00:01:36:19
Ryan McVinney
All right. Hey, people, we're here with Sean Joye submerged pre contact archeologist. Shawn, thanks for joining us today.

00:01:38:00 - 00:01:40:06
Shawn Joy
Yeah, thanks for having me, Ray. Good to be here, man.

00:01:40:12 - 00:02:04:12
Ryan McVinney
Cool, man. Yeah. Good to see you again. Sean and I have had a bunch of fun being around, screwing around on used boats, repairing them, working on them, and learning about your work over there, doing submerged archeology. So I think it would be a really interesting conversation. Can you tell people just describe your job a little bit? I think, you know, maybe not everybody understands or knows what a submerged pre contact archeologist does.

00:02:05:03 - 00:02:42:06
Shawn Joy
During the last glacial maximum during the last ice age, which was like 20,000 years ago, sea levels were 426 feet lower than they are today. So that opened up this huge landscape for folks to live on. So what I do is I look for these submerged Native American sites that are offshore, too, to help understand how folks got here and how folks lived on the coast and, you know, in the process help protect some of these sites from, you know, offshore wind development or or sand mud.

00:02:42:16 - 00:02:47:19
Ryan McVinney
Can you share why you're passionate about doing this work, this submerged pre contact? Yeah.

00:02:48:01 - 00:03:09:04
Shawn Joy
Yeah. I mean, ever since I was a kid like I've always been, I wanted to, like, look for answers and, like, explore. And the water was always, you know, a thing that I just absolutely loved. You know, you go to the doctor's office and you're getting your your blood pressure taken and it's high, and they tell you to calm down.

00:03:09:04 - 00:03:44:18
Shawn Joy
Like, where I go in my head is like the bottom of a deep, dark river. Like, that's peace for me. And so, you know, one of the one of the big, bigger archeological questions that we have is, you know, who were the first people to get here and how did they get here? And so there's just so many questions that we have about submerged contacts specifically that, you know, just the fact that we haven't found one, you know, coastal paleo Indian site on the East Coast or in the Gulf of Mexico.

00:03:44:18 - 00:03:59:20
Shawn Joy
I mean, that's such a it's such a high bar to just, like, go find the first one, man. Like, that's it's it drives me, you know what I mean? It's it's one of those things where, you know who else is looking for it? Like, I want to go find one man.

00:04:00:00 - 00:04:01:02
Ryan McVinney
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:01:04 - 00:04:32:17
Shawn Joy
So it wasn't until about, you know, two decades ago, you know, we had a we had a model that was it was called Clovis first. And we believe that, you know, this Clovis culture was the first folks that crossed over the Bering Land Bridge around 13,000 years ago. And they were the first Americans that over the last you know, like I said, two decades, we've started to find sites that were older than 13,000.

00:04:32:23 - 00:05:07:22
Shawn Joy
And, you know, Stone tools that did not match up with, you know, Clovis technology. We've also done a lot of core analysis up in Canada and realized that the the ice free corridor was an open and viable for folks to to actually, you know, migrate down it until like 12, 12,500 years ago. So that that model of, you know, people walking over the Bering Land Bridge, coming down the ice free corridor, it just it's not at this point right now.

00:05:07:22 - 00:05:37:06
Shawn Joy
I think there's barely anybody that's still hanging on to that paradigm. But there are folks that are very invested in it and will, you know, scratch and crawl their way. They'd like to keep that that paradigm going. But it's it's almost every year we find a site that's older and they're they're all over the place. You know, they're in Florida, they're in South America where they're predating, you know, this Clovis culture.

00:05:37:18 - 00:05:49:07
Ryan McVinney
Right. Right. Yeah. And that's pretty fascinating. I remember learning and, you know, in public school as a kid, that that was how people got here. It was across the land. So this is pretty groundbreaking, right?

00:05:49:14 - 00:05:56:21
Shawn Joy
Well, yeah. And so now we're we're completely rewriting the history books. Every single year. So stay tuned.

00:05:58:06 - 00:06:05:21
Ryan McVinney
And what I mean, like you say, so that was 13,000 years ago saying these are older. What is what is like the oldest site you've found or around? How old are they?

00:06:06:08 - 00:06:32:01
Shawn Joy
So the oldest site that I've personally worked on is Paige Latson. And and that's a really fascinating site. It's it's at the bottom of the Oslo River in Florida, just south of Tallahassee. And, you know, we were digging these these test units at the bottom of the river, literally through three feet worth of mastodon shit. And it was perfectly preserved.

00:06:32:01 - 00:07:03:02
Shawn Joy
I mean, I could see where, you know, they were eating pieces of cypress branches and they were perfectly cut to like the size of their jaw. Great seeds we see like gourd seeds. And, you know, all of a sudden we start finding these stone tools and, you know, it was just phenomenal. It was unbelievable. When we want to take a site and and we want to prove that, hey, this is a really old, secure site, we can believe in it.

00:07:03:19 - 00:07:33:07
Shawn Joy
You want unequivocal artifacts. So it's it's artifacts. There's no doubt in our mind that that humans made these artifacts. We want secure context. So you want to make sure that, you know, there wasn't a whole bunch of mixing of of the dirt and then you want solid dates. And so we ended up spending something like a quarter of $1,000,000 and just radiocarbon dates to prove that this was in context.

00:07:33:07 - 00:07:57:23
Shawn Joy
They just found this past year footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, and they dated to 21,000. So, of course, like whenever you have something that's super old like that, there's always going to be controversy about it. There's always going to be you got to have to go back. You've never it's never going to be that Hail Mary, where everybody's just, like, perfectly happy about your research.

00:07:58:08 - 00:08:09:11
Shawn Joy
You just cover your bases and you know you're going to spend a lot of money to prove to folks that this is a legitimate site and change the history books.

00:08:09:11 - 00:08:12:13
Ryan McVinney
What kind of boots are you using to go out and do this?

00:08:13:03 - 00:08:32:20
Shawn Joy
So we just picked up an 18 foot hydra sport which has been like so much fun to like. It was it was one of those boats that, you know, you could you can tell we bought it. You know, the advertisement went out and it was like just a barn burner boat. It's been sitting around forever to get it running.

00:08:33:07 - 00:08:46:08
Shawn Joy
You know, at the price that they had offered was like so low that literally there were 13 people, like, waiting to look at the boat that day. And we just happened to be the first ones there. And we take it around where they we got it started.

00:08:46:16 - 00:08:47:07
Ryan McVinney
Right now.

00:08:47:13 - 00:09:11:08
Shawn Joy
Got it for a sweet, sweet price and literally put like 100, 200 bucks into it. And it's. But so we've been using that we've been using that a lot because it's it's such a small boat and it's such an easy thing to tow. And we can put it in anywhere, you know, versus the sailboat which the wing a queen it's you know 32 foot is draft is five feet.

00:09:11:08 - 00:09:35:16
Shawn Joy
So it kind of limits us and when we can actually leave and where we can actually go. Yeah and then yeah we have a 32 foot 24, 32 foot Danzy that we just bought. That's us do dual diesel motors. So like that's really going to help us with a lot of the grant money that we have. It's just like cut in the cost of fuel.

00:09:35:17 - 00:09:44:18
Shawn Joy
Yeah, that where is in the shop right now. Just kind of getting it's it's tune up and yeah. Hopefully that'll be hitting the water here soon.

00:09:45:00 - 00:09:50:11
Ryan McVinney
Okay, cool. How, how big is the Dante. 32 foot, 30 hours. The same as that. As the sailboat.

00:09:50:11 - 00:10:01:08
Shawn Joy
Yeah. Yeah, it's insane. Like the size and the layout of the, you know, the motor cruiser versus Danzy is just like, oh, yeah, yeah.

00:10:02:14 - 00:10:04:19
Ryan McVinney
And your hydro sport. What, yours? The hydro sport.

00:10:05:07 - 00:10:07:01
Shawn Joy
It's 1994.

00:10:07:06 - 00:10:10:09
Ryan McVinney
Okay. And that's a little that's a little shorter, right? It's like 20.

00:10:11:06 - 00:10:12:04
Shawn Joy
Four, 88.

00:10:12:18 - 00:10:14:02
Ryan McVinney
That's kind of like you're banging around.

00:10:14:02 - 00:10:36:10
Shawn Joy
Get out there, Chris. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so like I said, man, it's so easy to just, like, put that in anywhere, you know, just tow it around. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a definitely a more relaxing boat for me versus like, you know, the sailboat where we're like, you got to constantly be looking at the tides like, oh my God, we're not going to make it in tonight.

00:10:36:12 - 00:10:39:20
Shawn Joy
We're going to anchor offshore and live out here tonight.

00:10:40:01 - 00:10:42:06
Ryan McVinney
Have you had have you had to do that before?

00:10:42:06 - 00:11:04:01
Shawn Joy
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll usually take the digging into the beach and yeah, chill out there. They'll run back and forth if we need beer or whatnot. Yeah, but yeah, yeah. There are ports that are marinas that are in the Apalachee Bay region. You know, the tides kind of play a big role in when you can leave and when you can.

00:11:04:04 - 00:11:20:22
Ryan McVinney
Yeah, yeah. It's pretty shallow cuts. Yeah. Get in. Yeah, right, right. I know people should know also that like Sean and I, it seems that we both share the passion for buying used junker boats and fixing them stuff.

00:11:20:22 - 00:11:40:07
Shawn Joy
You know, I have so much fun doing it. It's, it's great. And like, I know a lot of people, they get frustrated in it, but there's nothing better than like taking something that doesn't work or runs like a piece of shit and then turning around and making it go, you know, and, like, figuring out what's wrong, you know, start going down the list, switch this, I'll switch that out.

00:11:40:14 - 00:11:44:05
Ryan McVinney
Yeah, yeah. It's very empowering and satisfying when you get.

00:11:44:05 - 00:11:44:17
Shawn Joy
Friendly.

00:11:44:17 - 00:11:47:15
Ryan McVinney
As it can be frustrating when you don't get there. Somedays Yeah.

00:11:48:05 - 00:11:52:13
Shawn Joy
Yeah. Like what the what is it.

00:11:52:13 - 00:12:10:13
Ryan McVinney
Well actually I mean, and Sean and I just started another little video series for Boat Trainer besides stomping grounds, which is called Backyard Boaters and, you know, last month we were having fun messing around with an old whaler that's pretty beat up in the motor, hadn't run in years, but we got it running. So in.

00:12:10:13 - 00:12:13:07
Shawn Joy
A day. In a day? Yeah. Which is phenomenal.

00:12:13:07 - 00:12:33:15
Ryan McVinney
When last we touch base, you were about to follow the St Mark's like out off the coast of Florida. And this is when we were there. For those that haven't seen the full episode of our Stomping Ground series, it's all about exploring boat culture across America. You know, we were we were going up and down the St Mark's on a little deck boat learning about that.

00:12:33:15 - 00:12:37:09
Ryan McVinney
But can you tell me a little bit about that project and if you guys found anything cool?

00:12:37:20 - 00:13:01:19
Shawn Joy
Yeah. So I ended up following the St Mark's hour just with some side scan sonar that kind of looked for, you know, landscape features that would have been kind of useful for, you know, Native Americans back when it was dry land. But we just we got to grants to work in between the St Mark's River and the Ausilio River.

00:13:02:19 - 00:13:41:18
Shawn Joy
And we've developed as a kind of a of a group research cohort between the Europeans and some of the folks in Florida that we've developed a way to detect submerged pre contact sites using a sub bottom profiler which which basically pings out low frequency sounds to look below the bottom of the ocean and what we figured out is a lot of the artifacts that that are naturally made when folks are making stone tools, we call them flakes.

00:13:41:18 - 00:14:06:14
Shawn Joy
They're perfectly shaped to resonate at the same frequencies that the sub bottom profiler emits. And so with resonance, like everything that has a natural residency, I'm sure you've heard the or seen the, you know, the singer that sings with the glass and it starts to vibrate and breaks. So yeah, we're talking about that same process happening with the artifacts.

00:14:06:14 - 00:14:35:19
Shawn Joy
And so the artifacts are vibrating and the sub bottom profile is picking it up. And so we've been kind of just doing lines back and forth between the St Mark's and the Oslo River and so far, you know, when they were finding the those submerged pre contact sites in an Apalachee Bay which which is where we're working, you know, it was years and they knew that it took them to find 20 sites.

00:14:36:01 - 00:14:49:18
Shawn Joy
And, you know, Morgan Smith and I went out and found 20 sites in three days. And our success rate is somewhere up like 86%. Every time we go and dove at Target, there's a submerged recontact site at it.

00:14:50:01 - 00:14:50:21
Ryan McVinney
Wow, that's cool.

00:14:51:06 - 00:15:04:06
Shawn Joy
Yeah, it's it's it's really it's a technology that, you know, we got to keep pushing it and we got to see where the limitations are. But it's something that will fundamentally change the way that we do archeology in future.

00:15:04:12 - 00:15:20:03
Ryan McVinney
Yeah, I mean, congrats on finding all the sites at the end. So bottom profiler sounds fancy. Yeah, that's fine. That was my nickname in high school. Yeah.

00:15:20:03 - 00:15:20:16
Shawn Joy
You know.

00:15:20:19 - 00:15:32:20
Ryan McVinney
Gabe had actually brought up point. What are the signatures that you use for finding archeological remains? I think you kind of just talked about that, but I don't I mean, that's not a world I know a lot about. Is there anything else to say on that?

00:15:33:07 - 00:15:58:16
Shawn Joy
So, you know, the model that we use now is called the Danish model. And what that Danish that the Danish were, of course, the ones that that came up with it. But basically they took cultural history. So they looked at where folks would would camp out or, you know, how they would use the landscape for either fishing or camping or, you know, freshwater resources.

00:15:58:22 - 00:16:23:11
Shawn Joy
And they took the sea level curve to see where the coastline was throughout history and then they would hone in on those landscapes where there should be preservation. And so they would they were using this model up in the North Sea. And they they had pretty good success in finding a lot of Stone Age sites up in the North Sea.

00:16:23:11 - 00:16:50:20
Shawn Joy
So that's kind of the model that we use here in the U.S. whenever we're doing, you know, federal jobs or state jobs have you know, state agencies have also picked up, you know, these models. But the problem with that is it it highlights these these areas where, you know, the high probability areas where folks may have lived, but it excludes anything outside of like river channels.

00:16:50:20 - 00:17:17:03
Shawn Joy
And, you know, folks didn't just live in these paleo channels. They lived all over the place. And, you know, some of the sites that we're working in, in Appalachia Bay are nowhere near a river. And they have such great, you know, they're deflated sites. So basically it was an intact site. When the water levels of the sea rose enough, it washed out just the dirt, but left the artifacts in place.

00:17:17:03 - 00:17:38:13
Shawn Joy
And so they settled down to the bottom where there are, you know, to this day. And, you know, we're finding these specific spots where you can see someone broke off a big rock from the bedrock and brought it about 20 meters south and started making stone tools out of it. And it's just this, you know, compact little spot.

00:17:38:13 - 00:18:00:12
Shawn Joy
And who knows, it might have been a cool tree stump that somebody was sitting on, but a lot of the chipping debris from making those stone tools fit back together. And they're side by side and they've been submerged for, you know, probably 5000 years. So they've they've gone through 5000 years worth of hurricanes, but they're still relatively intact.

00:18:01:22 - 00:18:34:14
Shawn Joy
And so, yeah, these sites never would have been found using, you know, the Danish model that we use today. So hopefully the the so that method would use in this sub bottom profile is called the hull method. It's human, human altered lytic detection system. And so hopefully, you know, if we can start working in the hold method and using the Danish model, you know, start locating more sites, you know, it gives us a better opportunity.

00:18:34:19 - 00:18:52:13
Shawn Joy
You know, it's a big ocean out there, man. Yeah, I'm trying to find these. These locations is extremely difficult and extremely costly. Yeah. If we can narrow it down to specific areas that we can concentrate on. Like I said, I'll just fundamentally change the way that we do archeology.

00:18:52:19 - 00:19:03:23
Ryan McVinney
Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know if like listeners are getting like I think that's so cool that the, the coast was like how, how far away do we think the actual coast was from where it.

00:19:03:23 - 00:19:09:16
Shawn Joy
Is mainly depends on where you are in the U.S. So when you're in Florida.

00:19:10:03 - 00:19:12:00
Ryan McVinney
Yeah, a long forgotten coast kind of area.

00:19:12:00 - 00:19:39:22
Shawn Joy
Oh, yeah. Like the the coastline was 150, almost 200 miles south of where it is today. If you go all to California, though, where the topography, the offshore bathymetry is really steep. So we don't really move all that much. Yeah, but yeah, as you go along the Atlantic coast, you know, that distance changes. But you know, it's anywhere on average just 60 miles from where it is today.

00:19:40:00 - 00:20:07:22
Shawn Joy
Yeah. So it's such a, a huge area to investigate. And you know, you take folks, folks usually had a a range in which they can walk in a in a specific day and it's usually about ten kilometers. And so when you think about, you know, these paleo Indians that are living on the coast, they weren't walking to the modern coastline that we have on the on the East Coast.

00:20:08:05 - 00:20:28:01
Shawn Joy
So really, we have no idea about these folks. We have no idea like how they live, how they use the coast, what kind of tools they used. Nothing. We've we've not one site. So, you know, doing the work off off shore is just such a great opportunity to fill in, you know, these huge gaps in human history.

00:20:29:12 - 00:20:33:03
Ryan McVinney
Do you guys ever deal with, like, submersed those like submarines or anything.

00:20:33:13 - 00:21:02:17
Shawn Joy
Erm so the, the company that I work for, the private company search we, we partner up with Ocean Infinity and they have like some of the world's most incredible automated vessels and AUV, these come and yeah. Like that's going to be the future of a lot of this offshore survey is just you for all you know some of these boats are 70 meters long.

00:21:02:17 - 00:21:16:08
Shawn Joy
They're gigantic and they're automated. People are, you know, steering and and and collecting data from onshore. Well, you know, so that gives us a huge cut in emissions because they're elected.

00:21:16:09 - 00:21:17:00
Ryan McVinney
Right. Right.

00:21:17:13 - 00:21:52:23
Shawn Joy
A huge cut in in pay for, you know, having to have, you know, merchant Marines on the boat, you know, running the boat in addition to the scientists. You know, now the scientists can just sit in their living room, you know, and watch the data stream. And and it also gives us a super awesome opportunity to share some of these data with students and kind of get them excited and and, you know, inspired to to enter into the the Marine, you know, marine world and doing a lot of this research.

00:21:53:06 - 00:22:05:03
Ryan McVinney
Well, that's cool. And by the way, where could people learn more about this if they want? I mean, in addition to watching our stomping grounds episode where we have having talk about it, but where else can they go to learn more if they want?

00:22:05:03 - 00:22:36:09
Shawn Joy
So we have a nonprofit that we have set up. It's called the Archeological Co-op, and you can find that online, our co-op dot dot org. It's we can we can put it up on the on the screen for you here. It's right here. And and the private firm that I work for search. So search dot com. You know, there's there's a bunch of you know, folks there that do everything, you know, involved in in archeology.

00:22:36:09 - 00:22:47:13
Shawn Joy
I think we have something like 44 sectors, special sectors that people, you know, specialize in. And, you know, smart free contact is one of them and I lead that sector so.

00:22:47:18 - 00:22:54:10
Ryan McVinney
Yeah well Sean Joyce enjoy that. Thanks. Thanks for talking to you.

00:22:54:13 - 00:23:01:01
Shawn Joy
So I'm looking forward to the next time you're you're down in Florida. We can dig around with boats and drink some beers.

00:23:01:04 - 00:23:04:12
Ryan McVinney
Oh, man, I can't wait. I'm I'm already planning my next trip, so.

00:23:04:14 - 00:23:06:11
Shawn Joy
Awesome, awesome quality.

00:23:07:01 - 00:23:09:17
Ryan McVinney
To it. All right. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening, everybody.

00:23:10:09 - 00:23:11:21
Shawn Joy
All right. So you do. Cheers.

00:23:13:08 - 00:29:40:00
Ryan McVinney
All right, everyone. Thanks for watching and listening to the Stomping Grounds podcast. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please consider following your favorite on the show. Please tune in to the next episode. And for now, we'll see you out there on the water. Stay floating, America.