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Image: Brendan Foley.
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Hellenic Ministry of Culture Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities archaeologists Dr. Dimitris Kourkoumelis and Dr. Theotokis Theodhoulou with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution archaeologist Dr. Brendan Foley. In the background is the Chios Strait, operations area for the 2008 field season.
The oldest seagoing shipwrecks yet discovered lie off the southern coast of Turkey at Ulu Burun and Cape Gelidonya. Both are from about 1300-1200 B.C., the very end of the Bronze Age, almost contemporary with the Trojan War. “Those vessels are not that big–maybe 60 feet, that is 20 meters long or thereabouts. Iconography from that period shows double-ended ships; think of the frescoes from Akrotiri,” says Foley, who wishes that tomorrow the team would stumble across a 3,000 B.C. vessel in Greek waters. Finding one vessel wouldn’t be enough, however. “To do proper science we need to have baseline archaeological data, then we can very quickly build a statistically significant database of wrecks from any and all periods.” DNA analysis and new robotic technologies that rapidly process and document wrecks regardless of water depth allow this interdisciplinary team of scientists to solve the problems of finding underwater sites, accessing them, and investigating them in a cost-effective and time-effective way. Foley reports that robotic vehicles make it possible to investigate a shipwreck site in a few hours and extract that baseline archaeological information. “After a robotic survey we can sit back and say, ‘We’ve got a photo mosaic that shows us in two dimensions everything on the surface of the wreck. We have sonar maps (basically terrain maps) to give us the three dimensionality of the site. We have this ancient DNA technique to tell what was actually carried in the vessels, what the cargo was composed of, what the people were eating, and what was being traded.’ With all that information we can arrive at a very educated and well-informed decision about where to direct the major resources for a full-scale excavation.” Although Foley is a diver and worked mostly by scuba diving before 1997, almost all his work since that time has been too deep, “beyond scuba diving”. This means using a variety of deep submergence technologies and robots (both Greek and American) for investigations. These come in four different “flavors”: human-occupied vehicles, remotely operated vehicles that are connected to the surface ship with a cable, completely freeswimming robots known as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), 60 May/June 2009 I ODYSSEY
and a hybrid ROV-AUV recently built at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. But sudden opportunities can shift focus back to scuba diving, as in spring 2008, when the Hellenic Ministry of Culture suggested a survey of several shallow-water wrecks in the Chios Strait. There was not time enough for the team to obtain funding and to schedule robotic vehicles, but diving operations were possible. “Ephorate archaeologists Drs. Kourkoumelis and Theodhoulou suggested we go to Chios to see how rapidly and efficiently we could investigate these shipwrecks. In ten days of diving we investigated ten shipwrecks and an ancient anchorage,” says Foley. “It was quite a productive summer.” The team examined wrecks from Archaic and Classical Greece, the Hellenistic period, and the Byzantine era. In fact, they unveiled the greatest concentration of ancient shipwrecks ever documented by archaeologists. The archaeologists collected an artifact from each of the ten shipwrecks and are now performing DNA analysis to determine the original contents of the jars. That 2008 expedition made it clear that the next step in scuba diving archaeology should be to integrate various scientific sensors into diver-operable packages allowing archaeologists to generate the types of data sets that physical scientists routinely collect, but without the expense of a ship and robotic vehicles. Diving into the watery blue underworld at Prasonissi in the Chios Strait, the archeologists saw on the sea floor beneath them a field of amphorae, almost undisturbed since approximately A.D. 400-600 (the late Roman/early Byzantine period). An even more significant archaeological site was a fifth-century-B.C. (the middle of the Classical period) wreck surveyed off the island of Oinousses, just to the east of Chios, a vessel that was carrying a cargo of amphorae from Chios. Foley conveys a dramatic context for the wreck’s probable sinking date by observing that “possibly Plato or Socrates was alive when the ship went down.” But the most exciting find was a much older shipwreck from the Archaic period (seventh century B.C.), with a cargo of amphorae. The dis-