Canada’s quirky federal jobs: Meet an underwater archaeologist

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Brandy Lockhart doesn’t have a typical government job.

An underwater archaeologist with Parks Canada, Lockhart is part of a seven-person team that works at national parks and national historic sites across Canada, researching, surveying and excavating submerged archaeological sites.

Underwater archaeology, in some ways, is not so different from land archaeology, Lockhart said. The goal of the work is to study artifacts, features, structures and other things that are left behind to “rebuild the lives of those who used them.”

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However, the day-to-day job ranges quite a bit, depending on the time of year.

Based out of the Mulligan Building on Walkley Road — which houses a conservation lab and an artifact reproduction area — Lockhart said underwater archaeologists mostly work in the office during the winter, writing reports for the field projects that took place during the summer and reviewing and cataloging photos, videos and artifacts. The team also analyzes data and works on three-dimensional digital site models.

Ahead of an expedition, Lockhart’s team does swimming and diving drills to practice for any situations that could occur — like running out of air underwater.

“You have a full face mask, so one of the things we’ll do is take the whole thing off and just get used to that feeling of the water hitting your face and not having the air right there immediately,” Lockhart said. “We get ready for multiple different scenarios so that we’re not taken by surprise.”

Field season usually runs from May to October and involves multiple projects, with priority often based on urgency and availability.

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The team can sometimes stage a project from land, using smaller boats to get to sites. Other times, projects can be staged from a 90-foot ship that docks in Prescott for the winter.

Lockhart’s team does various kinds of work including diving projects that can include recording a new or known site using hand-drawing, mapping, photo and video; recording a known site using remote-sensing equipment; excavation of a site to remove and analyze artifacts; monitoring a known site’s condition over time; and surveying an area to look for a new site.

“In that particular kind of project, the day would start with us getting up, getting the boat and the equipment ready for surveying, and then we do what we call painting the bottom. We’re basically driving the boat in parallel lines, recording overlapping lines of data on an onboard computer. And you do that all day.”

Diving days, she said, usually start with a meeting where her team will develop a plan and lay out objectives for the day. For every dive, there needs to be a minimum of four people on the team including one diver, a dive supervisor, a standby diver who is ready to go in the event of an emergency, and a person to take care of umbilical cables, depending on whether divers are doing surface supply or scuba diving.

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“We all do most of these roles so we’ll swap throughout the day, depending on what the goals are and how long people can actually be underwater,” Lockhart said.

According to Parks Canada, the underwater archaeology team specializes in archaeological sites and structures like shipwrecks, canal locks and sunken aircraft found below the surface of Canada’s oceans, rivers, lakes and foreshore.

Underwater archaeologists are paid between $100,531 and $114,948.

While Lockhart has been in the field (or in the water) for 17 years, she has had a passion for the work for much longer.

From the Ottawa area, Lockhart first started scuba diving when she was 12, learning to dive in the St. Lawrence River.

“I always loved the water,” she said. Her dad used to run a marina and the family all took diving lessons together. “From that, I kind of developed an interest in historic sites underwater. At the time, I didn’t know underwater archaeology was actually a thing you could do.”

She had originally imagined she would become a marine biologist. It wasn’t until she was doing her undergrad in science at McGill University that Lockhart added archaeology as a second major.

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“I was doing a project in the library and found the handbook to underwater archaeology,” Lockhart said. “As soon as I saw that, it was like: That’s a job, that’s it, that’s what I’m gonna do.”

After graduating, Lockhart moved to Australia and did a master’s degree in maritime archaeology at Flinders University, completing her studies in 2006. There, a professor told her that it was hard to find a job in the field and that, if she wanted to go back to Canada, she should work at Parks Canada.

After doing volunteer work at the government agency, Lockhart secured a six-month term position as an underwater archaeologist where she helped with condition assessments and submerged cultural resource inventories. She left the government for about eight years to work as a land archaeologist for an environmental engineering company, but eventually made her way back to Parks Canada when a position became available in 2016.

Each archaeologist is involved with about three projects a year. Lockhart said that last summer she spent a few weeks surveying from a ship and took part in diving expeditions in the Arctic and in Red Bay, N.L., where the team was working to fix a reburial of an archaeological site.

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“Red Bay is actually a site that the team has been working on since the ’70s. It was excavated in the ’80s,” Lockhart said. “Once they recorded everything and mapped the whole site, they realized one of the best ways to preserve the woods from the wreck is actually to rebury it. You could always raise timbers and bring them to conservation but it’s an ongoing process, it takes a long time and a lot of money, whereas in the water, especially cold, dark water, it’s really good for the preservation of wood. So they re-buried it.”

All of the members of her seven-person team have a niche, Lockhart said. While some focus on photography and managing equipment, Lockhart’s expertise is in working with 3D models and geographic information systems which can be used to compare changes in sites.

“We can add more data over time and build a model up over time,” she said. “For example, artifacts that we removed, I can digitally place back into the model so we know exactly where they were found and rebuild the site as we excavate.”

But Lockhart’s favourite part is finding something she hasn’t found before.

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“You know you’re the first person to see it in 100, 200 years, I find that pretty exciting,” Lockhart said. “My biggest example is the first time I dove on HMS Erebus, working on the Franklin expedition wreck.”

“I had been working on the 3D model, so I knew what it looked like, but it’s very different when you’re down there. Swimming on the bottom, the visibility that day wasn’t very good. You’re swimming, you’re swimming and, all of a sudden, it just got really dark and a wall appears in front of me. This 15-foot high wall, you can’t see over until you get to the top. And, just looking around, everything you see is new.”

Lockhart also loves researching the artifacts that are found, like coins and personal objects. She noted that, when artifacts are brought out of the water, they are wrapped up and shipped back to the lab in Ottawa in a container with water they are found in to maintain a damp environment for them.

“When you get back, you can start researching and going deeper and try to figure out what it is, where it came from, who might have owned it, and all the details you can gather from one little object.”

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