SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — A warehouse along the Savannah River
is holding historical treasures that evidence suggests remained
lost for more than 240 years — a cache of 19 cannons that
researchers suspect came from British ships scuttled to the river
bottom during the American Revolution.

The mud- and rust-encrusted guns were discovered by accident
when a dredge scooping sediment from the riverbed last year as
part of a $973 million deepening of Savannah’s busy shipping
channel surfaced with one of the cannons clasped in its metal
jaws. The crew soon dug up two more.

Archaeologists guessed they were possibly leftover relics from
a sunken Confederate gunship excavated a few years earlier in
the same area, according to Andrea Farmer, an archaeologist
for the Army Corps of Engineers. But experts for the U.S. Navy
found they didn’t match any known cannons used in the Civil
War. Further research indicates they’re likely almost a century
older and sank during the  buildup to the Revolutionary War’s
bloody siege of Savannah in 1779.

Fort Jackson just outside Savannah, Ga.

Painting of The Siege of Savannah.