There's more than one way to sink a ship, as Donald Sanders knows. President of the Institute for the Visualization of History in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Sanders spends a lot of his time repeatedly sinking a vessel off the coast of Cyprus.
The ship isn't real — it's a computer model of a vessel that sank in the fourth century BC. Sanders is trying to recreate what happened when the ship went down, leaving nearly 500 intact amphorae, or storage vessels, to be found centuries later on the sea floor. By loading his ship with a virtual crew and cargo, then sinking it in a number of different potential disasters, Sanders hopes to find a sequence of events that closely matches the archaeological evidence, and so work out might have happened centuries ago.
That's a good article. One might add, however, that a lot of archaeologists are probably wary of this stuff because the actual explanatory power of it is . . .at best, unclear most of the time. Sure it looks nice, but most archaeologists are more interested in theoretical models of how people adapt, organize their societies, etc., rather than just recreating what it looked like. No doubt it can be useful and is appealing to the general public, but it's a lot of expensive work for returns that basicaly don't get you published in mainline journals. Very often.