Archaeology Team Helps Find Oldest Deep-Sea Shipwrecks

September 16, 1999

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By Alvin Powell
Gazette Staff

The two Phoenician ships were bringing tons of wine from Tyre to the thirsty city of Memphis in Egypt, or perhaps to the new Phoenician colony at Carthage.

Heavily loaded and 30 miles from land, the wide, tublike ships probably wallowed in the growing waves of a storm. As the wind intensified, blowing hard out of the east, the desperate crew lit an offering of frankincense to pacify the storm gods.

It didn’t work.

The ships, probably part of a larger fleet of cargo carriers, swamped and sank to the Mediterranean’s muddy bottom, where they lay upright, preserved in the relative stillness and tremendous pressure of the deep, for 2,700 dark, silent years.

They were found 1,000 feet down in June by a team made up of Harvard archaeologists led by Lawrence Stager, Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel, and a crew from the Connecticut-based Institute for Exploration, headed by oceanographer Robert Ballard.

The ships are the oldest ever found in the deep sea and may change the understanding of ancient Mediterranean commerce.

Because many shallow-water wrecks have been found, historians and archaeologists believed that ancient sailors preferred routes that hugged the coastline. Modern technology, however, is opening a new field of deep-water archaeology, which is showing that ancient sailors did indeed venture far from shore – and occasionally met with disaster.

"I think the primary benefit of this type of find is a better understanding of the economy of the time," Stager said. "When we fit the ships in with the sea ports and their hinterlands, we can better understand how economic resources were developed on land, channeled through the ports, and shipped abroad along well-established sea routes."

A large load of wine heading to Egypt or Carthage would not be unusual for the time, Stager said. Carthage was a Phoenician colony established near modern Tunis on the North African coast before 800 B.C. At the time of the wrecks, just 50 years later, the people living there probably had not even planted vineyards, Stager said. As for Egypt, vineyards were limited and the wines not so fine as those of Phoenicia, so the load could have been destined for the Pharaoh’s table.

Voyage Into the Past
Expedition leader Ballard, perhaps best known for his discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, said before they began the researchers knew the ships’ approximate location and were sure they were at least several hundred years old. It was up to the expedition’s archaeologists, however, to determine whether the ships were from the Byzantine Period or from the Iron Age, a thousand years earlier – an Iron Age discovery would be a major find.

The group, which also included researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, found the wrecks using sophisticated sonar technology and a remote-operated deep-water submersible called Jason.

All eyes were glued to the screen as they approached the wreck and Jason’s underwater camera showed more and more of the ship. As they got closer, however, Ballard tore his eyes from the screen to look at Stager.

"I was looking at Larry instead of the screen because I can’t tell Iron Age amphoras from Byzantine amphoras," Ballard said. "When I saw his big smile, I knew they were Iron Age."

The amphoras are clay jars used to ship the wine. Relying on the distinctive design of the amphoras – still stacked on the deck but filled with sand over the millennia – Stager determined that the wrecks came from the period between 750 B.C. and 700 B.C., making them the oldest ships ever discovered in the deep sea.

The vessels, one 58 feet long, the other 48 feet, were well-preserved for their age. But they weren’t untouched by time. Worms ate the exposed hull and other wooden structures, leaving the piles of amphoras – 750 on the two ships – plus other artifacts such as incense stands, heavy stone anchors and crockery sitting on the bottom.

One piece, a ceramic decanter with a mushroom-shaped lip, helped archaeologists pinpoint the ship’s origin to Phoenicia – what is today Lebanon.

Researchers believe the ship was buried up to its deck by the impact with the ocean bottom and that the ship’s lower hull may have been preserved in the mud.

Ballard and Stager said after the discovery that they were willing to mount a second expedition to begin excavation of the ships. That would probably not happen for a year or two, they said, because they have to develop the technology to excavate the ships remotely – and quickly.

"The game is not ‘Will it be difficult to do?,’ the game is ‘Can you do it fast?’, because time is money," Ballard said. "On land, one person can brush away [at a find]. At sea, you have 80 people brushing away. It’s very expensive to operate at sea."

On the Trail of the Dakar
The ships were first seen in 1997 almost by accident. A U.S. Navy research submarine had been commissioned by the Israeli Navy to search for a sunken Israeli submarine, the Dakar. The U.S. sub returned without the Dakar, but with recorded fuzzy images of possible ancient wrecks.

The Navy had worked with Ballard in the past and notified him of the images. Ballard turned to Stager, whose archeological expertise – honed during 15 seasons excavating the ruins of Ashkelon in Israel – made him the perfect person for the job.

After viewing the images, Stager determined that the wrecks either came from the Byzantine Period, from about 324 A.D. to about 638 A.D., or the much earlier Iron Age II, which ran from about 900 B.C. to about 600 B.C.

"They were definitely wrecks," Ballard said. "We sort of knew they’d be wonderful or not wonderful."

‘Deckchair’ Archaeology
The expedition’s archaeologists had considerable experience on land as part of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, but few had tried marine archaeology – particularly the relatively new field of deep-sea archaeology.

The technology proved amazing to some, allowing them to plunge beneath the sea to find intact, well-preserved ships, while a similar find on land would require months or years of painstaking digging to excavate.

"The engineers made it really easy for us," said Catherine Beckerleg, a Harvard doctoral student who was part of the archaeology team. "I’m not sure what was more amazing, the ancient wrecks or the technology we used to find and view them."

Beckerleg said she was surprised at the high quality of the photos Jason returned to the surface. The submersible took high-resolution photographs every 13 seconds, making a mosaic of the ship.

Beckerleg and other expedition members said the deep-water wrecks were quite distinct from shallow-water wrecks, which can be torn apart on the rocks and stirred by the action of the waves.

"Shallow-water wrecks are often so disturbed from the waves you can’t even tell where the bow and the stern are," Beckerleg said.

Stager shared Beckerleg’s amazement with both the level of the ships’ preservation and with the technology employed to find them.

"I call it ‘deckchair’ archaeology," Stager said. "We never got our hands dirty or wet [and] we made two of the most startling finds of deep-water archaeology. It doesn’t seem quite fair."