Artifacts are more than the sum of their parts. Rather than seeing artifacts as just things, we should instead see them as silent storytellers, enlightening whoever may listen with tales of their making, their application, and their eventual retirement from use.

Today, The Mariners’ Museum and Park’s exhibition space is roughly 90,000 square feet; but when the Museum opened to the public in November 1933, there was only a little over 12,000 square feet of gallery space.

Hidden Histories will give names, agency, and interpretation of the unidentified Black people depicted in our Collections.

By building on existing research and conducting new experiments, the team aims to find a way to extract sulfur from waterlogged archaeological wood to prevent future damage.

Learn about the history, design, operation, and use of “flying bridges” – ferries propelled solely by water flow!

Fear Not! For I have scoured The Mariners’ Collection, walked the dark storage rooms, and gotten up close and personal with five of our creepiest and most mysterious artifacts, so you don’t have to. I’ve listed the following artifacts for their varying levels of creep-factor or for the fascinating or mysterious stories behind them. All jus

The Carta Marina depicts the geography of Northern Europe, the British Isles and Iceland. More importantly, it is populated with figures from Scandinavian history and folklore, and with animals both real and imagined.

A short history of model ships made of bone, built by prisoners of war.

When salt gets into things it’s not meant to get into, it almost always causes problems, but the nature of the problem varies by material: organics (like wood, leather and cloth), metals (like iron and copper), and other inorganic materials (like ceramics, glass and stone).

Details on the paper treatment and common conservation techniques for a print that came to the lab due to its fragile condition.