Mr. Church is
the Project Manager for C&C Technologies, Inc. (The principal contractor
for the project) and Chief Scientist for the project. He is responsible
for overseeing almost every aspect of the project, including planning,
field operations, and facilitating communication between the various
contractors, the Minerals Management Service, and Office of Ocean
Exploration (NOAA). Mr. Church is also the Principal Investigator for
the archaeological component of the Project and although he is
ultimately responsible for the final project report his primarily
responsible is for the archaeological assessment and reporting.
Mr. Church has a Masters of Arts degree in Maritime History and Nautical
Archaeology from East Carolina University and a Bachelors of Arts degree
in History with a minor in Biology from the University of Arkansas at
Little Rock. Prior to joining C&C Technologies, Inc. in 1998, Mr.
Church was employed as an underwater archaeologist by Dr. Gordon Watts
at Tidewater Atlantic Research in Washington, North Carolina and a
Diving Safety Officer at East Carolina University.
Mr. Church has written over 90 Archaeological Assessment Reports as
Principal Archaeologist for marine surveys in the Gulf of Mexico. A few
of these include reporting on the discovery and tentative identification
of the tanker, Halo (2000); co-authoring, as principal
investigator, the initial report of the discovery of the U-166
and investigation of the SS Robert E. Lee (2001); participating
as co-principal investigator in the second U-166 archaeological
field project (2003); and evaluating an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)
site investigation of the freighter, Alcoa Puritan (2002). In
addition he has worked on a number of shipwreck excavations around the
United States and abroad including the excavations of the
seventeenth-century “Stone Wall” wreck in Bermuda (1995), the
nineteenth-century French Frigate, Lhermanie (1995), the Civil
War gunboat CSS North Carolina (1997), and the Civil War
Blockader USS Peterhoff (1998) to name a few.
Mr. Church is a member of the
Society for Historic Archaeology, the American Academy of Underwater
Sciences, Southwestern Geological Society, and the Marine Technology
Society. In 2002, Mr. Church and his colleague Daniel Warren were
co-recipients of “The Corporate Leadership Award” from the U. S.
Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service.
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