A Pirate's Life with Lisa Briggs

Lisa Briggs brings A Pirate's Life to the H-E-B Performance Hall at the Tobin Center on Sunday, November 8. It's a National Geographic LIVE presentation, and Briggs is the one leading it. She's an underwater archaeologist, a scuba instructor, and a technical diver, as well as a National Geographic Explorer. Her research focuses on ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks and how science can pull the stories of their cargoes and sailors back to the surface. She also spends a lot of her time encouraging young students to get into STEM.

The show treats piracy as a year-round fascination rather than a Halloween costume. It starts by taking you to the Mediterranean to see how piracy shaped the Roman Empire, then introduces the Pirate Queen of China, and finally heads into the lab to follow the most famous renegade of all, Blackbeard. It's a wide-ranging look at the history of piracy, moving from the ancient world to the Golden Age and into the scientific work that helps reconstruct those lives.

If you've ever wondered what actually happens when an archaeologist finds a wreck, this is a good place to see it. Briggs works from the inside—she's the one diving on these sites—so she can talk about the actual process of recovering a ship and what the artifacts tell us about the people who sailed them. The presentation is part of National Geographic's LIVE series, which brings their explorers on stage to share their research directly.

A Pirate's Life is at the H-E-B Performance Hall in San Antonio on Sunday, November 8. You can find more details and tickets at the Tobin Center's website.