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IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, nearly every item Americans buy comes from overseas packed in huge standardized metal containers that are stacked by the thousands in ships, from near their keels to ten to fifteen layers above the deck.1 The technology may be new, but the importance of shipping by water is not. For millennia, water has provided the easiest way to transport goods and people over long distances. It has only been in about the last 150 years that there has been any real alternative-first in the form of railroads, then trucks and aircraft. In the center of North America, the archetypical watercraft was the glistening, magnificent white steamboats memorialized by such works as Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.2 But as vital as such vessels were to the nation's commerce, we know little about them. Not one of the thousands of nineteenth-century wooden-hulled steamboats is still floating today. We know some historic vessels through photographs and old newspapers and other archival sources, but few are precisely described. Little actual literature from the nineteenth century, and few specifications or plans, survive. This is where archaeology can make an immediate and important contribution. Even if a steamboat exploded and burned or wrecked by ramming into a submerged log, it was not necessarily obliterated. Much of the cargo and machinery would likely have been salvaged, but part of the hull and other elements could have survived, buried in silt and gravel, preserved in the anaerobic environment under water.3 Thus, there are likely thousands of wrecks underwater, in the river bank, and under soybean fields and corn fields where river channels have changed, often as the result of those same sinkings, which blocked the flow of the river and forced it to move away from the wreckage.4 There are obstacles to the search for lost watercraft in inland waterways, not least that visibility underwater is usually almost nil due to silt loads and other factors. Stream current also causes problems, as does debris carried by water that lodges in exposed wreckage even on the bottom of a stream. In addition, many streams have extensive meander belts that have buried wrecks of all ages under many feet of silt and clay. Fortunately, though, there are mechanisms to protect historic watercraft sites in rivers from looters and insensitive researchers, if not from the further ravages of rivers, when banks collapse exposing the wrecks. There can be no doubt who owns wrecks found in navigable streams. In 1987, in an effort to resolve questions about ownership, Congress passed the Abandoned Shipwreck Act.5 This law assigns legal ownership of vessel remains to the state in whose waters the vessel is found. In Arkansas, for example, the State Land Commissioner must deal with boat wrecks. But federal environmental protection laws can complicate matters of jurisdiction. Due to an intriguing set-up, the water in navigable streams is actually the responsibility of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and thus falls under national environmental protection, whereas the bottom of rivers and streams are the responsibility of the states.6 This can make resources difficult to manage, and site survey and documentary research become crucial.7 Federal and state agencies also play a role when assessing whether or not a wreck site is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.8 There was an extraordinary opportunity to examine the wrecks of steamboats and other vessels during the drought summer of 1988, on the Arkansas shore of the Mississippi River opposite Memphis, Tennessee. The discoveries can teach much about the riverine heritage of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Memphis has been a dangerous place for steamboats and related large watercraft for 175 years. This city long depended on a busy, unprotected waterfront located on a bend of the river. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a slalom course of giant stone and concrete piers for railroad bridges was added, followed by bridges for trucks and automobiles. …