J. Richard Steffy, a self-taught expert on ancient shipbuilding who helped revolutionize the field of underwater archaeology and earned a reputation as "the Sherlock Holmes of ancient ship reconstructors," has died. He was 83.
Steffy, a professor emeritus of nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University and a board member of the affiliated Institute of Nautical Archaeology, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder Nov. 29 in a nursing home in Bryan, Texas, said his son Loren.
"He was really considered the world authority on the subject of ancient ship reconstruction," said George Bass, a professor emeritus at the university and founder of the institute.
Bass said he has been receiving messages from around the world in response to the death of the man who helped make shipwreck analysis a scholarly discipline.
"He was a pioneer in so many ways," Bass said. "I doubt there ever was a course in the history and theory of wooden-hull construction before the one he taught here."
Steffy was a pioneer of the art of reconstructing entire ships, such as the wreck of a 2,300-year-old Greek ship found off Kyrenia, Cyprus.
In the early 1970s, Steffy and a team of archaeologists reconstructed the ship from thousands of fragments of wood -- an endeavor chronicled in the National Geographic in 1974.
"He reassembled the entire hull," Bass said. "All these thousands of pieces were fastened together with stainless steel rods. The hull is still on display in Kyrenia.
"Since then, guided largely by him, the Greeks built a full-scale replica and sailed it to Cyprus," he said. "It went through a gale and handled beautifully. In fact, we learned so much about how Greek ships handled from what he did."
Until then, Bass said, "no one had ever tried to reassemble an ancient hull, and now it's commonplace. For example, one of Dick's students went to Turkey and spent several years putting a thousand-year-old hull back together using his techniques."
Over the years, Bass said, shipwreck archaeologists "from Israel to Italy to the United States to Canada" called on Steffy for his advice, "and he went to those places, or people came down to sort of sit at his feet to learn."
They included archaeologist Shelley Wachsmann, who was working on the excavation of an ancient fishing boat found in the Sea of Galilee in 1986.
"He called on Steffy right away as the premier expert in the world to come and give advice," said Bass.
