Every day hundreds of items, ranging from Spitfire engines to ancient stone tools, are dragged up by fishing vessels while wreck sites are revealed after nets become snagged on sunken craft.
As fishing intensifies, more discoveries are being made this way, a process that threatens to run out of control. As a result, English Heritage will launch a pilot scheme this month that aims to keep in order the avalanche of historical finds now produced by our fishermen.
“There are about 46,000 recorded shipwrecks, crashed aircraft and sites of archaeological finds in English waters that we know of,” said archaeologist Simon Davidson. “However, these recorded sites only make up about 10% of the total down there, we estimate.”
Read Robin McKie article at The Guardian