Abandoned Shipwrecks Act particular case of the salvage of the "Nuestra Señora de Atocha", an historic and culturally significant wreck off the coast of Florida, in which the State of Florida was unable to prevent illegal salvage operations due to a lack of a suitable law that would disallow it, spurred action at the federal level to address the situation. On April 29, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the bill (Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1987, Pub. L. 100-298, 102 Stat. 432) into law. The law provides that any wreck that lies embedded in a state's submerged lands is property of that state and
Archaeology of shipwrecks Archaeology of shipwrecks The archaeology of shipwrecks is the field of Archaeology specialized most commonly in the study and exploration of shipwrecks. Its techniques combine those of archaeology with those of diving to become Underwater archaeology. However, shipwrecks are discovered on what have become terrestrial sites. It is necessary to understand the processes by which a wreck site is formed to take into account the distortions in the archaeological material caused by the filtering and scrambling of material remains that occurs during and after the wrecking process. "When a ship is wrecked, it suffers many changes of state until the