Peabody man seeks own kind of treasure

PEABODY – While many of us spend our 8-hour workdays in front of a computer, Peabody resident Victor Mastone is out to sea, uncovering buried treasures and pirate ships. Well, sort of.”Most typical days would be very boring,” quips the state’s Chief Custodian of Underwater Archaeological Resources. “You’d see me sitting at my computer doing research or writing or data entry.”But on the days he’s not stuck in his downtown Boston office, Mastone is doing what he loves and what he believes he’s meant to do: showing why Massachusetts’ heritage is important to helping residents have an identity as a people.By diving deep into the state’s oceans, lakes and rivers, Mastone and his crew bring life to what has long rested on the earth’s surface. During his investigations, he’s dug out canoes by local Native American tribes, aircraft remains, fallen lighthouses and sunken vessels. Not exactly treasure chests or pirate ships, he said, but fishing boats and cannons.”Shipwrecks are really moments in time,” he said. “You can really sit down and tie it to a single event?There are a lot of ancient shipwrecks in our area, we just haven’t located them yet. They hold a lot of information on who used them and tell of the society at that time.”Mastone enjoys finding completely submerged sites most because the water has preserved much of its structure, such as wood, fabric, and paint.”I’ve always had an interest in history and archaeology,” said the 54-year-old Peabody resident. “I liked playing in the dirt.”As a young student, his teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.”I said I’d like to be a historian or a garbage collector,” he quipped. “Little did I know that you combine those into archaeology.”Mastone went on to study his hobby at colleges in Boston and New York. Since graduation, he’s practiced the profession all throughout New England from the coasts off Maine down through Rhode Island. For the last 22 years, however, Massachusetts’s waters have been his home away from home.”There’s a common joke in my house that no one knows what I do,” he said. “They think it’s about treasure. A lot of people don’t understand that archaeology isn’t really about the objects, it’s how they relate to people.”To drive his point home, Mastone dedicates much of his time to speaking at schools and universities about the importance of his work and that of maintaining these historic sites.”The idea of finders keepers is totally inaccurate,” he explained. “Everything belongs to someone. The commonwealth owns shipwrecks, cannons, bridge structures?You can’t just go out there and take it.”Aside from finding a prehistoric Native American site, Mastone would like to achieve one thing before he abandons his scuba gear.”My goal has been, before I’m out of this job, to at least have some of (underwater preserves) in place,” he said. “It gives people a connection. To take people on tours, drop a camera down and talk about the site, that would be the ideal thing to be able to do.”However, he’d create one rule that every visitor would have to abide by.”They’re there to look, but not touch. To look, but not take.”