MANTOLOKING – — Scientists still don't know if the ship wreckage found on the beachfront is from a 164-year-old Scottish boat, but they could know soon.

The wreckage, which some believe to be The Ayrshire — a Scottish boat that was carrying immigrants that wrecked and ran aground in January 1850, was discovered last month during the construction of a steel coastal sea wall at the beach along the border of Mantoloking and Brick. The wooden ruins are being examined by marine archaeologists. The unknown wooden boat's parts were strew all around the piles of unused steel, that waits to either be planted into the dunes or moved to the side.

"They are in the middle of an investigation that will include background research into archival sources to get a better idea of both the landscape and the shoreline and how it's changed over time," said Kate Marcopul, a supervising historic preservation specialist for the State Historic Preservation Office. "They're going to look at ships from the time period to see what information they might be able to find on those registers."

Marcopul would not say that wreckage was from the Ayrshire, but did say that it appears to be from the "mid-19th century." The determination on where the wreckage came from will be in known in about two weeks.

If it turns out that this was the Ayrshire, she said that a determination would be made on whether the remains could be removed or if the project would continue around the wreck. It is still unknown whether there is more wreckage buried within the 15 to 20 feet of sand along the wall.

"The goal is to determine what the physical limits of the wreck are in an effort to figure out whether the project can avoid further impact," Marcopul said. "Working around it and essentially preserving what remains of the wreck beneath the ground's surface.

"In historic preservation, keeping it in place and avoidance of impacts is always the ultimate goal," she added, "and this is what this investigation is going to determine."

Erick Doyle, the manager of the sea wall project, says that the site is 96 percent complete, except for the section where the wreckage was found. Doyle said that working around the wreckage would lead to other options of completing the wall without damaging its integrity.

"There's a potential that we might end up installing stone in this area, which will give you a similar level of protection," Doyle said. "The exact specifics of how big the stone has got to be and how deep down you have to put it, and how big the pile would be in order to give a similar level of protection, we'd have to go through an engineering analysis and we haven't gotten to that point yet."

"It's up in the air as to if we can shift this alignment to go out a couple of feet to get around this thing depending on where it actually lays, where the bough is, and which way it's facing," he added. "If we can work around it, that's the ideal situation from our perspective."

Doyle said the wall only has a few feet of wiggle room to work with in order to comply with restrictions set by the Army Corps of Engineers.

"We don't want the sheet pile wall being so far out there on the ocean side of the dune so we had to use some common sense," he said. The entire project, including the investigation on the wreckage, is initially being paid for by the state, but they are looking to have those costs reimbursed by the Federal Highway Administration and would not speculate on the cost at this time.

Email Jay Scott Smith at JSmith14@gannett.com