LEGO Lost at Sea scoops Rescue Project of the Year award

The LEGO Lost at Sea project has scooped a prestigious prize at the Current Archaeology Awards for 2023.

Spearheaded by Tracey Williams, the LEGO Lost at Sea project documents the bricks and minifigure accessories that have been washing ashore in Cornwall, England for the past quarter-century. In 1997, a rogue wave knocked 62 shipping containers off the Tokio Express about 20 miles off Land’s End – including one housing nearly 5 million LEGO elements.

Those pieces (many of which were nautical in nature) have been appearing on beaches in Cornwall ever since, and beachcomber Tracey Williams has been scouring the sand to chronicle them for the past decade. A broad team of oceanographers, beachcombers and environmentalists have since chipped in to the project, and Williams last year published her book Adrift: The Curious Tale of the LEGO Lost at Sea.

The initiative has now been recognised at the Current Archaeology Awards for 2023, where it scooped the gong for Rescue Project of the Year. It’s not what you’d call a traditional archaeological dig – there are no ancient civilisations or bits of pottery involved – but Current Archaeology magazine writer Joe Flatman has described it as ‘a story of citizen-science of the best type’, and ‘the story of the future of archaeology, told now’.

Williams received the award at the Current Archaeology Live! 2023 conference on February 25, 2023. Voted for by members of the public and subscribers to Current Archaeology, the awards recognise contributions to the field of archaeology over the previous 12 months.

“‘I would just like to thank all the people in Cornwall and beyond who pick up plastic from beaches, and all the fishermen who bring it up in their nets,” Williams said, accepting the award. “This is for them.”

Adrift: The Curious Tale of the LEGO Lost at Sea is available now at all good bookstores. You can find out more about the project over on Twitter, or through our interview with Tracey Williams.

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