UofSC archaeologists recover three Civil War cannons from Pee Dee River 

A team of underwater archaeologists from the University of South Carolina raised three Civil War cannons - each weighing upwards of 15,000 pounds - from the silty sediment of South Carolina’s Great Pee Dee River near Florence, S.C., on Tuesday (Sept. 29).
The two Confederate Brooke rifle cannons (11.8 and 12.25 feet each) and one captured Union Dahlgren cannon (8.9 feet) were artillery of the CSS Pee Dee, a 150-foot Confederate gunboat, a Macon-class gunboat built to patrol waterways and protect the coast.
“The recovery of these three cannons -- the complete armament of a Confederate gunboat -- offers unique insight in the arming and intended role of this warship to contest the Union blockade off the coast of South Carolina and to perhaps engage in high seas raiding against Northern merchant vessels,” says James Spirek, an underwater archaeologist with the College of Arts and Sciences' South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA).