Press release

“Ghost Ships of the Klondike Gold Rush,” an illustrated lecture by Robyn Woodward describing her work preserving and documenting shipwrecks along the Yukon River in Canada, will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 1 in Ramsey Library, Whitman Room.

Some 290 stern-wheelers and steam-tugs once plied the Yukon River, and provided the primary method of transportation during the great Klondike and later Alaska Gold Rushes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of these vessels were abandoned in remote locations and only two intact vessels survive.

Woodward, adjunct professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, will provide an illustrated lecture on the history, landscape and vessels of this dynamic period of North American history. She is project archaeologist for the Institute of Nautical Archaeology’s Yukon River Survey, and director of the excavation of Sevilla la Nueva in Jamaica.

The event is co-sponsored by the WNC chapter of Archaeological Institute of America and the UNC Asheville Departments of Art and Classics. It is free and open to the public.

For more information, call Laurel Taylor, UNC Asheville lecturer in classics and art, at 828/251-6290.