At the turn of the 19th century, fledgling US steamboat companies vied for control of navigation rights in the country’s northern lakes and rivers. The second steamboat to be launched on Lake Champlain operated between 1815 and 1819. In September of 1819, this commercial vessel, Phoenix, caught fire en route to St. John, Quebec, and eventually sank on the northern face of Colchester Shoal reef, where it remains well-preserved for archaeological investigation (figures 1 and 2). Although the boilers and other machinery were salvaged shortly after its sinking, the hull is largely unburied and accessible for documentation. Preliminary measurements of the hull have been taken by members of the Lake Champlain Maritime Society in 1980, and the results were published in a report the following year (Davison 1981). In addition to this preliminary investigation, more in-depth fieldwork was deemed necessary to reconstruct the steamboat and elucidate finer details of construction and operation of this vessel. As the second steamer to be launched on Lake Champlain and the earliest surviving archaeological example of a steamboat, Phoenix represents a perfect focal point for researching the development of steam transportation in North America and the technology and maritime culture that developed during that transformation.

The 2009 fieldwork in Lake Champlain marked the first field season (since the 1980 efforts) for conducting archaeological investigations and data recovery on the Phoenix site, and was executed under an archaeological permit granted by the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation.  The goal for the first year of work was to record the offsets of the extant hull in order to begin creating an archaeological site plan and construction drawings for Phoenix. No artifact recovery was planned for the project, though permission for limited recovery was granted from the Vermont State Archaeologist should the team encounter rare or endangered material culture during the hull investigations.