Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1998 - 49

Of equal archaeological importance are the stunning
fifth-century b.c. bronze warriors discovered in 1972 near
Riace in southern Italy; Henry VI I Is warship Mary Rose,
raised from the waters off Portsmouth in 1982; and the
Swedish man-of-war Vasa, raised from Stockholm Harbor in
1961. The Mary Rose and Vasa have vividly revealed details
of daily life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
of the reach of humans who recycle metals and glass, burn marble for lime and wood for
heat, and drop and shatter fragile objects,
underwater finds are often uniquely preserved.
Out
Even organic remains, when covered quickly by protective
layers of anaerobic sediment, remain beautifully preserved
for thousands of years. Further, if such
remains are found in ships that can be
dated precisely by coins or dendrochronology, being in closed deposits
they are more accurately dated than
many found on terrestrial sites. Thus,
the excavation of shipwrecks should
one day provide the ultimate histories
of tools, weapons, household goods,
and much more.
The study of ships themselves, however, is as important as the study of
their contents, for a history of mankind
cannot be imagined without watercraft.
Without them there would be no one in
Australia, where people presumably
paddled 60,000 years ago. There would
be no Minoan civilization without the
deliberate colonization of Crete around
6000 b.c., and Cyprus, Sardinia, and
Malta would be barren of humans.
Rivers would have remained barriers to
be bridged, rather than highways, to
Egyptians and Mesopotamians. The
Greeks would not have preserved Western civilization by
defeating the Persians in a naval battle at Salamis, and
Rome could scarcely have fed her populace without grain
imported from Africa aboard great wooden freighters.
Think of the lands discovered, settled, supplied, and
defended since then by ships. Imagine a world without
Viking raiders, the Norman invasion, the Spanish Armada,
Arab dhows and Chinese junks, the Santa Maria, Magellan,
the Mayflower , slave ships, fishing boats, ferries, China
clippers, Trafalgar, racing yachts, U-boats, D-Day, the Battle of Midway... the list extends to todays aircraft carriers
and supertankers that bring fuel to our automobiles.
In 1976, oceanographer and engineer Willard Bascom
estimated that 95 percent of all wooden sailing ships ever
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built have been lost at sea. Drawing on records kept by
Lloyd's of London, he wrote that "in the five years from
1864 to 1869, 10,000 sailing ships insured in England
were lost in various parts of the world," suggesting that during the nineteenth century "about half of all working sailing ships were wrecked or lost." These statistics suggest
that some 300,000 sailing ships per century were sinking
around the world, mostly in shallow water from running
onto rocks, reefs, or beaches. In the Aegean alone, more
than 1 1,000 wrecks would lie on the sea floor if only one
vessel a year sank since the first cave-dwelling mariners
crossed from the Greek mainland to the island of Melos to
obtain obsidian for their simple tools. But many more vessels were lost. In 480 b.c., according to Herodotus, a
storm sank ZUUrersian warships in
just one day.
The goal of finding a wreck from
each century of the past four millennia in the Mediterranean alone is well
within reach, for a plentiful supply of
ancient wrecks for archaeological
study lies in depths accessible to
divers. The excavation of shipwrecks
of every century and, ultimately, every
decade of the past, all over the world,
will thus provide the most complete
histories of art and technology imaginable, as ships carried everything
ever made by mankind - from tiny
beads to giant Egyptian obelisks.
With the archaeological value of
shipwrecks so well established, it is
puzzling that their study is not yet a
routine part of the preparation for a
íV) career in archaeology. Ships are not
included in the dozens of handbooks
I published on classical archaeology.
Were ships any less important to
ancient Greeks and Romans than their temples, sculptures, pottery, and coins? Perhaps the answer lies in the
fact that until Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emil Gagnan
invented the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (scuba) in 1943, the notion of applying the rigors
of a land excavation to sites underwater was out of the
question.
Until that time, underwater work, especially in the Mediterranean, was confined to the recovery of chance finds
such as the bronze Piombino Apollo, now in the Louvre,
netted by fishermen off the Italian coast in 1812, and the
classical Greek statues of a youth from Antikythera and a
Zeus or Poseidon from Artemision, found by Greek sponge
divers in 1900 and 1927. Sponge divers similarly raised
Archaeology

Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1998

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1998