For more than 160 years, the wreck of the steamboat Heroine was buried beneath a cattle pasture in southeastern Oklahoma, until a shift in the channel of the Red River exposed its timbers and machinery to the light of day. Today, nautical archaeologists are uncovering the secrets of the Heroine, a vessel that sank in 1838 during a voyage to supply U.S. Army troops at a frontier outpost in Oklahoma.

Kevin Crisman, associate professor of anthropology at Texas A&M University, has led the group of researchers in the project. The thousands of artifacts discovered aboard the ship have included shoes and dishes used by the crew and barrels of pickled pork with the meat still on the bone.

The excavation of the Heroine is just one of many projects that are made possible through Crisman’s Faculty Fellowship in Nautical Archaeology. The funding from the Fellowship has also allowed Crisman to spend several years surveying shipwrecks and performing archaeological studies in Portugal’s Azores Islands. He is currently researching and editing a book on shipwrecks of the War of 1812, which is near completion.

Crisman’s Fellowship has benefited not only his research, but that of his students, as Crisman has used Fellowship funds to fund their travel to study and document shipwrecks off the coasts of Australia, Bulgaria and Kingston, Ontario.

The Fellowship also has acted as a match for grants from outside agencies and institutions, such as the National Geographic Society, which then doubles the contribution to the Institute’s research efforts. Crisman says he believes that the Fellowship has helped build the reputation that Texas A&M has made for itself around the world as a leader in the field of maritime archaeology.