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Team discovers ancient shipwreck cluster in Mediterranean Sea
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Copyright 1997 Nando.net             Copyright 1997 N.Y. Times News Service

(July 31, 1997 00:51 a.m. EDT) -- Exploring off the northwest coast of
Sicily with a once-secret nuclear submarine, oceanographers and
archaeologists have discovered the largest concentration of ancient
shipwrecks ever found in the deep sea, including one ship that may have
carried a prefabricated temple.

The findings, announced Wednesday, take archaeology deeper than ever
before, promising a new era of discoveries in maritime history.

A research team led by Dr. Robert Ballard, whose previous finds include the
Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck, announced the discovery of
eight sailing ships lying 2,500 feet beneath the Mediterranean. Until now,
maritime archaeology has been largely confined to coastal shallows of less
than 200 feet, the range for scuba divers.

But with the U.S. Navy's NR-1 nuclear submarine, the explorers were able to
reach 3,000 feet and search the bottom for weeks at a time, using
long-range sonar to detect shipwrecks at great distances. Then, with the
remotely controlled vehicle Jason, which can descend 20,000 feet and use
grappling arms to collect artifacts, the team inspected the wrecks up close
and retrieved 115 items from the oldest ships.

Because the artifacts were found in international waters, they presumably
belong to the salvagers under maritime law. Their historical value is
inestimable, their monetary value unestimated.

Five ships were from Roman times, presumably lost in storms while plying
the busy Rome-North Africa trade route. The oldest, a 100-foot-long vessel
dating from about 100 B.C., is one of the earliest Roman wrecks ever
discovered.

Her holds were filled with amphoras, the clay shipping containers of the
ancient world. Another Roman ship, probably from the first century A.D.,
carried cut stones, apparently ready for assembly into a temple.

Also in the wreckage, which is spread over 20 square miles, were three more
modern sailing ships. One was an Islamic ship from the 18th or early 19th
century; the other two were lost in the 19th century.

Ballard, president of the Institute for Exploration, in Mystic, Conn., and
other team members described the discovery in interviews and at a news
conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington.

Recalling the view of the wrecks from the submarine, Ballard said in an
interview, "All of sudden, we realized we had found a graveyard of ships
spanning 2,000 years."

The Navy still owns and operates the NR-1, but at the end of the Cold War
it parted the curtain of secrecy and made the submarine available for
exploration, including Ballard's research into ancient shipping.

Dr. Anna Marguerite McCann, the expedition's director of archaeology, was
enthusiastic about the immediate discovery, but even more so about its
implications for the future. Both she and Ballard spoke of the research as
a demonstration that deep-sea archaeology is emerging as a new branch of
science.

When marine archaeology was limited to 200 feet, 95 percent of the sea
floor was beyond its reach. Archaeologists and historians often assumed
that mariners in antiquity hugged the coast and rarely ventured into the
open sea. Their assumption is only now being disproved.

"The high seas were definitely traveled by mariners in ancient times,"
Ballard said. "That means the potential for discovery with this new
technology is huge. The average depth of the Mediterranean is 9,000 feet,
and so there must be a tremendous amount of antiquity preserved in the deep
sea."

Not only does the large number of shipwrecks in a relatively small area
suggest heavy traffic, but the state of preservation at great depths
promises to be especially revealing.

"Deep-sea wrecks are more likely to be intact and their artifacts
unbroken," Dr. McCann said. "In shallow waters, they are more likely to get
banged up by waves and against reefs, encrusted with coral or buried by
sand or looted by treasure hunters."

The wooden decks, rigging and upper hulls of the five Roman ships had been
destroyed by wood borers, team members said, but timbers buried in mud were
well preserved. The cargoes appeared to be undisturbed. The pilot of the
remotely controlled Jason, which is owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution on Cape Cod, was able to maneuver the robot on a detailed
survey of each wreck and pick up delicate artifacts, including fine glassware.

Among the items are kitchen and other household wares, fine bronze vessels,
two heavy lead anchor pieces and at least eight different types of amphoras
intended for storing wine, olive oil, fish sauce and preserved fruit, Dr.
McCann said.

One of the most intriguing items is the heavy cargo of high-quality marble
or granite building stones still in the hold of a Roman ship from the first
century. The artifacts include monolithic columns and large cut blocks of
stone.

"Some of the stones appeared to have notches where they were to be fitted
together," Ballard said. "Perhaps this was a pre-fab temple being shipped
somewhere."

Dr. McCann, an adjunct professor of archaeology at Boston University, said
discoveries like these promise to provide a new picture of trade in the
ancient Mediterranean. "A new economic history of the Roman world is going
to have to be written," she said.

In 1989 Ballard, working with Dr. McCann, made their first ancient deep-sea
discovery, a small fourth-century Roman ship they named Isis. The Jason
robot was used to recover artifacts that suggested it was a widely traveled
trading vessel. The location of the wreck, off Sicily, suggested that the
ship was sailing between Rome and North Africa

For the new explorations, Ballard's expedition returned to the site, about
80 miles northwest of Trapani, Sicily. The waters there are known for their
treacherous currents and dangerous reefs.

In some cases, the submarine picked up debris trails on the bottom,
evidence of what Ballard said was a storm-tossed ship in distress that was
jettisoning cargo in an attempt to save itself. Sometimes at the head of a
debris trail would be the wreck of the ship. A trail that did not lead to a
wreck presumably told the story of a storm's survivor.

These trails reminded Ballard of the story of St. Paul in Acts 27:38: When
his Rome-bound ship ran into a storm, "they lightened the ship" by throwing
over the cargo.

Further exploration of the Rome-North Africa route is planned and next
summer, Ballard said, he is to investigate trade routes in the Black Sea.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times
<http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/073197/health15_13616.html>
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