David Gibbins

Last updated
David Gibbins
Born1962 (age 5960)
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
OccupationNovelist, archaeologist
LanguageEnglish
NationalityBritish and Canadian
Education University of Bristol (B.A.)
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Ph.D.)
Genrearchaeological and historical fiction
Childrenone daughter
Website
www.davidgibbins.com

David Gibbins (born 1962) is an underwater archaeologist and a bestselling novelist.

Contents

Early life

Gibbins was born in 1962 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, to British parents who were academic scientists. He is related to the Victorian historian Henry de Beltgens Gibbins and to Brigadier Henry John Gordon Gale, DSO and Bar. After growing up in Canada, New Zealand and England he attended the University of Bristol, where he was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in Ancient Mediterranean Studies. He spent part of 1984 in Turkey funded by a Travel Scholarship from the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara. In 1984 he was awarded a Research Scholarship by Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in archaeology in 1991.

He qualified as a scuba diver in Canada at the age of 15, and since then has dived extensively around the world. [1]

Career

Academic career

From 1991 to 1993 he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. From 1993 to 2000 he was a lecturer in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies at the University of Liverpool, and from 1999 to 2001 he was an Adjunct Professor of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. [2] During the 1980s and 1990s he led many expeditions to investigate ancient shipwrecks and submerged ruins in the Mediterranean, including Roman shipwrecks off Sicily and the harbour of ancient Carthage. In 1999–2000 he was part of an international team excavating a 5th-century BC shipwreck off Turkey. His publications on ancient shipwreck sites have appeared in scientific journals, books and popular magazines.

Since 2002 he had been a full-time writer and independent scholar. In 2015 he co-founded the research group Cornwall Maritime Archaeology, which has made numerous shipwreck discoveries off south-west England. In 2016 he rediscovered the wreck of the Schiedam, a ship involved in the evacuation of English Tangier in 1684 and associated with Samuel Pepys, [3] and in 2018 the site of the President, an English East Indiaman. [4] In 2019 on another wreck he discovered a unique 16th century copper-alloy statuette of the crucified Christ attributable to Guglielmo della Porta. [5]

Writing

On leaving academia he became a novelist, writing archaeological thrillers derived from his own background. His novels have sold over three million copies and have been London Sunday Times and New York Times bestsellers. His first novel, Atlantis , published in the UK in 2005 and the US in 2006, was published in 30 languages. Since then he has written ten further novels which have been published in more than 200 editions internationally. His main series is based on the fictional maritime archaeologist Jack Howard and his team, and forms contemporary novels involving an archaeological backdrop. He has also written two historical novels set in ancient Rome.

Honours

He is a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow, for which he received the Churchill Medallion of the Trust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Select bibliography

Fiction

Jack Howard series

  1. Gibbins, David. 2005. Atlantis . London: Headline and New York: Bantam Dell. ISBN   978-0-7553-2422-4
  2. Gibbins, David. 2006. Crusader Gold . London: Headline and New York: Bantam Dell. ISBN   978-0-7553-2927-4
  3. Gibbins, David. 2008. The Last Gospel . (The Lost Tomb in US). London: Headline and New York: Bantam Dell. ISBN   978-0-7553-3514-5
  4. Gibbins, David. 2009. The Tiger Warrior . London: Headline and New York: Bantam Dell. ISBN   978-0-553-59125-5
  5. Gibbins, David. 2010. The Mask of Troy . London: Headline and New York: Bantam Dell. ISBN   978-0-7553-5395-8
  6. Gibbins, David. 2011. The Gods of Atlantis . (Atlantis God in US). London: Headline and New York: Bantam Dell (2012). ISBN   978-0-7553-5398-9
  7. Gibbins, David. 2013. Pharaoh. London: Headline and New York: Bantam Dell. ISBN   978-0-755-35403-0
  8. Gibbins, David. 2014. Pyramid. London: Headline and New York: Bantam Dell. ISBN   978-0-755-35406-1
  9. Gibbins, David. 2016. Testament. London: Headline and New York: Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN   978-1-4722-3019-5
  10. Gibbins, David. 2018. Inquisition. London: Headline and New York: Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN   978-1-2500-8064-6

Total War Rome series

  1. Gibbins, David. 2013. Destroy Carthage. London: Macmillan and New York: Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN   978-0-2307-7094-2
  2. Gibbins, David. 2015. The Sword of Attila. London: Macmillan and New York: Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN   978-1-250-03895-1

Non-fiction

Footnotes

Related Research Articles

Atlantis Fictional island in Platos works, now a synonym for supposed prehistoric lost civilizations

Atlantis is a fictional island mentioned in an allegory on the hubris of nations in Plato's works Timaeus and Critias, wherein it represents the antagonist naval power that besieges "Ancient Athens", the pseudo-historic embodiment of Plato's ideal state in The Republic. In the story, Athens repels the Atlantean attack unlike any other nation of the known world, supposedly bearing witness to the superiority of Plato's concept of a state. The story concludes with Atlantis falling out of favor with the deities and submerging into the Atlantic Ocean.

Maritime archaeology Archaeological study of human interaction with the sea

Maritime archaeology is a discipline within archaeology as a whole that specifically studies human interaction with the sea, lakes and rivers through the study of associated physical remains, be they vessels, shore-side facilities, port-related structures, cargoes, human remains and submerged landscapes. A specialty within maritime archaeology is nautical archaeology, which studies ship construction and use.

Kyrenia ship

The Kyrenia Ship is the wreck of a 4th-century BC ancient Greek merchant ship. It was discovered by Greek-Cypriot diving instructor Andreas Cariolou in November 1965 during a storm. Having lost the exact position, Cariolou carried out more than 200 dives until he re-discovered the wreck in 1967 close to Kyrenia in Cyprus. Michael Katzev, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, directed a scientific excavation from 1967–69. Preservation of the ship's timbers continued during the winter of 1970. Katzev later was a co-founder of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. The find was extensively covered in a documentary by the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation titled "With Captain, Sailors Three: The Ancient Ship of Kyrenia"]. The ship itself was very well preserved with approximately 75% of its hull in good condition. It found a new home at the Ancient Shipwreck Museum in Kyrenia Castle, where it remains on exhibit.

HMS <i>Association</i> (1697) British Royal Navy warship

Association was a 90-gun second-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched at Portsmouth Dockyard in 1697. She served with distinction at the capture of Gibraltar, and was lost in 1707 by grounding on the Isles of Scilly in the greatest maritime disaster of the age. The wreck is a Protected Wreck managed by Historic England.

Foresail

A foresail is one of a few different types of sail set on the foremost mast (foremast) of a sailing vessel:

The Antikythera wreck is a Roman-era shipwreck dating from the second quarter of the first century BC.

Keith Muckelroy (1951-1980) was a pioneer of maritime archaeology. Instead of the traditional particularist or historiographic approach used by maritime archaeologists, Muckelroy's ideas were new to the field, influenced by the prehistoric and analytical archaeology he learned under Grahame Clark and David Clarke at Cambridge, the tenets of processual archaeology gaining traction in the U.S., and his own experiences on shipwreck sites in British waters, notably the 1664 Dutch East Indiaman Kennemerland, several Spanish Armada wrecks, and the Mary Rose.

Franck Goddio is a French underwater archaeologist who, in 2000, discovered the city of Thonis-Heracleion 7 km off the Egyptian shore in Aboukir Bay. He led the excavation of the submerged site of Eastern Canopus and of Antirhodos in the ancient harbour of Alexandria. He has also excavated ships in the waters of the Philippines, significantly the Spanish galleon San Diego.

Mensun Bound British marine archaeologist

Mensun Bound is a British maritime archaeologist born in Stanley, Falkland Islands. He is best known for directing the excavation of the Etruscan 6th-century BC shipwreck off Giglio Island, Italy, the oldest known shipwreck of the Archaic era, and the Hoi An Cargo which revolutionized the understanding of Ming-Vietnamese porcelain from Vietnam's art-historical Golden Age.

Edgerton Alvord jr Throckmorton, known as Peter Throckmorton, was an American photojournalist and a pioneer underwater archaeologist, frequently described as the Father of Underwater Archaeology. Throckmorton was a founding member of the Sea Research Society and served on its Board of Advisors until his death in 1990. He was also a trustee for NUMA and was an instructor at Nova Southeastern University.

George Fletcher Bass was an American archaeologist. An early practitioner of underwater archaeology, he co-directed the first expedition to entirely excavate an ancient shipwreck at Cape Gelidonya in 1960 and founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in 1972.

Ancient Black Sea shipwrecks found in the Black Sea date to Antiquity. In 1976, Willard Bascom suggested that the deep, anoxic waters of the Black Sea might have preserved ships from antiquity because typical wood-devouring organisms could not survive there. At a depth of 150m, the Black Sea contains insufficient oxygen to support most familiar biological life forms.

Charles T. Meide American underwater archaeologist

Charles T. Meide, Jr., known as Chuck Meide, is an underwater and maritime archaeologist and currently the Director of LAMP, the research arm of the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum located in St. Augustine, Florida. Meide, of Syrian descent on his father's side, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised in the nearby coastal town of Atlantic Beach. He earned BA and MA degrees in Anthropology with a focus in underwater archaeology in 1993 and 2001 from Florida State University, where he studied under George R. Fischer, and undertook Ph.D. studies in Historical Archaeology at the College of William and Mary starting the following year. Meide has participated in a wide array of shipwreck and maritime archaeological projects across the U.S., especially in Florida, and throughout the Caribbean and Bermuda and in Australia and Ireland. From 1995 to 1997 he participated in the search for, discovery, and total excavation of La Salle's shipwreck, La Belle , lost in 1686. From December 1997 to January 1998 he served as Co-Director of the Kingstown Harbour Shipwreck Project, an investigation sponsored by the Institute of Maritime History and Florida State University into the wreck of the French frigate Junon (1778) lost in 1780 in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In 1999 he directed the Dog Island Shipwreck Survey, a comprehensive maritime survey of the waters around a barrier island off the coast of Franklin County, Florida, and between 2004 and 2006 he directed the Achill Island Maritime Archaeology Project off the coast of County Mayo, Ireland. Since taking over as Director of LAMP in 2006, he has directed the First Coast Maritime Archaeology Project, a state-funded research and educational program focusing on shipwrecks and other maritime archaeological resources in the offshore and inland waters of Northeast Florida. In 2009, during this project, Meide discovered the "Storm Wreck," a ship from the final fleet to evacuate British troops and Loyalist refugees from Charleston at the end of the Revolutionary War, which wrecked trying to enter St. Augustine in late December 1782. He led the archaeological excavation of this shipwreck site each summer from 2010 through 2015, overseeing the recovery of thousands of well-preserved artifacts.

Honor Frost Pioneer in underwater archaeology

Honor Frost was a pioneer in the field of underwater archaeology, who led many Mediterranean archaeological investigations, especially in Lebanon, and was noted for her typology of stone anchors and skills in archaeological illustration.

The Society for Underwater Historical Research (SUHR) was an amateur maritime archaeology organisation operating in South Australia (SA). It was formed in 1974 by recreational scuba divers and other persons to pursue an interest in maritime archaeology and maritime history. The SUHR was renamed as the South Australian Archaeology Society in March 2012 as part of a plan to expand its activities beyond maritime archaeology to include other archaeological disciplines.

Ralph K. Pedersen is a nautical archaeologist from Levittown New York, United States. He was the DAAD Gastdozent für Nautische Archäologie at Philipps-Universität Marburg 2010-2013, and has been Distinguished Visiting Professor in Anthropology and Knapp Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of San Diego, and the Whittlesey Chair Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at the American University of Beirut. He has been teaching online courses in archaeology in the History Department at Southwestern Assemblies of God University since 2009.

Alonnisos shipwreck

The Classical Shipwreck at Alonnisos is a shipwreck of the Classical Greek period that sunk near the islet Peristera at a depth of 30 m. Its cargo of 3000-4000 amphoras made it the largest transport ship yet known of its period when excavation began in 1992, and it carried wine from Mende and Skopelos. In addition to amphoras, the ship transported many valuable items including black-glazed cups, plates and bronze tableware.

Phoenician joints Wood joinery technique used in shipbuilding

Phoenician joints is a locked mortise and tenon wood joinery technique used in shipbuilding to fasten watercraft hulls. The locked mortise and tenon technique consists of cutting a mortise, or socket, into the edges of two planks and fastening them together with a rectangular wooden knob. The assembly is then locked in place by driving a dowel through one or more holes drilled through the mortise side wall and tenon.

References