Texas Archeological Legacies: 30 Years After the Excavation of the La Belle Shipwreck

Texas Archeological Legacies: 30 Years After the Excavation of the La Belle Shipwreck

A panel discussion featuring Brad Jones, Chuck Meide, Amy Borgens, and Amy Mitchell-Cook

The discovery of the French explorer ship La Belle in 1995 in Matagorda Bay was a watershed moment in Texas archeology. The ship’s excavation and conservation were massive undertakings that resulted in a wealth of artifacts and research. As important as these are to the story of French exploration of Texas, their legacy has also profoundly shaped the careers of the many archeologists who participated in the project. Join four members of the La Belle excavation project team as they share how the legacy of this excavation continues to influence their own research, as well as their insights as managers of this invaluable archeological collection.

This presentation is supported in part by a grant from Humanities Texas.

Brad Jones joined the Archeology Division of THC in 2009 and has been the director of the THC’s Archeology Division and the State Archeologist since 2019. With over 30 years of experience in archeology and ethnohistory of Texas and the Americas, his research has focused on all periods of Texas, but Jones specializes in the articulation of Native American communities with European colonial empires and their material cultural expression. He has been involved in the management and exhibit of the French ship La Belle and publications about it, and he is currently working on a report on the THC excavations of Fort St. Louis and Presidio La Bahía.

Chuck Meide is a native Floridian and a maritime archaeologist, and since 2006 he has served as the Director of the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program or LAMP, the research arm of the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Anthropology with a focus in Underwater Archaeology at Florida State University and undertook Ph.D. studies in Historical Archaeology at the College of William & Mary. Chuck has worked on a wide variety of shipwreck and other maritime sites across the world, including the French explorer La Salle’s ship La Belle (1686) in Matagorda Bay, Texas, the Spanish Armada galleon La Trinidad Valencera (1588) in Ireland, and the French frigate Junon (1780) in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In St. Augustine, Florida, which is America’s oldest port, Chuck has conducted underwater excavations at Fort Mose, America’s first free African American settlement from 1752-1763, and the Storm Wreck, a shipwreck lost in December 1782 while carrying wartime refugees evacuating the city of Charleston during the American Revolution. Chuck has written over 50 research papers or other publications and has appeared on PBS’s Nova and Secrets of the Dead and National Geographic Channel’s Drain the Oceans.

Amy Borgens is the State Marine Archeologist at the Texas Historical Commission (THC). She joined the THC in 2010 after working for six years in underwater and terrestrial cultural resources management. She graduated with a B.A. in Fine Arts from Purdue University and began work at the Conservation Research Laboratory in the summer of 1997. She enrolled in the Nautical Archeology Program (NAP) at Texas A&M University (TAMU) that fall. She graduated with an M.A. from the NAP in 2004 and completed a Ph.D. in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Texas State University in December 2025.

Dr. Borgens has been associated with notable Texas shipwreck projects, including La Belle (1686), USS Westfield (1863), and Will-o-the-Wisp (1865). In addition, she assisted in the excavation of Oklahoma’s only shipwreck archeological site, Heroine (1838), and the investigations of early 19th-century shipwrecks at depths exceeding 4,000 ft. in the Gulf of Mexico (the Mardi Gras and Monterrey Shipwreck Projects). Collectively, she has worked on sites dating from the Byzantine Period to the mid-20th century in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Canada, Turkey, the Gulf, and the Falkland Islands. As an author or coauthor, she has collectively produced more than 50 reports, articles, and chapters in peer-reviewed journals and industry publications, including (as an author and co-editor) La Belle: The Archeology of a 17th Century Ship of New World Colonization, recipient of the 2017 Keith Muckelroy Award.