BBC report of Italian coast Greek shipwreck - not overly informative!

[Imperial Dave]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29797269

BBC doing their best to give the bare minimum of information but another ancient shipwreck site beginning to yield its treasures

[Patrick Waterson]

Associated Press are a bit more informative.

The divers descended 410 feet into dark Mediterranean waters off Italy, their lights revealing the skeleton of a ship that sank thousands of years ago when Rome was a world power. A sea-crusted anchor rested on a rock. The ship's cargo lay scattered amid piles of terra cotta jars, called amphora.

Highly trained technical divers with a Florida-based group called Global Underwater Explorers — GUE for short — are helping Italian researchers unlock the mysteries of an ancient shipwreck thought to date to the second Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. Able to descend hundreds of feet farther than most divers, they aide the archaeologists by swimming about the wreck fetching artifacts — as no robotic submersible can.

On this dive, they swam past the large amphora used to carry wine, olive oil and other cargo on Mediterranean trade routes centuries ago — feeling as if they were transported to another time.

"It felt very much like a ghost ship awaiting the boarding of ancient mariners," said Jarrod Jablonski, one of the divers with the exploration group based in the Florida community of High Springs.

Many of these divers honed their deep-water abilities in Florida's labyrinths of underwater caves. Now GUE provides the technical divers needed to access cargo and other artifacts from a ship though to have sailed around 218-210 B.C. — when Rome and Carthage were fighting for naval superiority in the Mediterranean.

Called the Panarea III, the ship was discovered off the Aeolian island of Panarea in 2010 by American researchers using sonar and a remotely operated submersible in waters about 40 miles north of Sicily.

Archaeologists said the ship is a wooden vessel about 50 feet long that could have hit rough seas and broken up on rocks before plunging to the sea bottom — it was possibly a wealthy merchant's cargo ship or one used to supply the Roman military.

"This shipwreck is a very important occasion to understand more about the daily life on the ancient ship, as well as the real dynamics of ancient trade," said Sebastiano Tusa, an Italian archaeologist who is studying the site. "Of course, there are other similar shipwrecks that can offer similar study cases. But this has the peculiarity to be in a very good preservation condition."

The ship was so far underwater that it has been safe for centuries from looters and entanglement in fishing gear.

As Jablonski and seven other GUE divers explored the wreck in September, Italian archaeologists shadowed them in a small submarine, shining a bright light on the trove of Greco-Roman artifacts. As researchers in the sub pointed to objects, the divers retrieved them, swimming to the sub's window for viewing. A thumbs-up, and the items were attached to balloons and sent to the surface.

At such depths, diving is tricky work.

Nitrogen becomes increasingly toxic to humans below 100 feet. Divers below 200 feet experience feelings similar to becoming drunk, making working with tools or fragile objects clumsy. But the GUE divers use specially prepared mixes of gases, which eliminate the problem of diving so deep. But the gases must be balanced carefully at each depth, or they could die or become extremely sick.

The divers must slowly descend. They can only work for about 30 minutes before making a 4-to-5 hour ascent to protect against illness.

"Technology hasn't substituted the human hand, with its articulated five fingers, for uncovering and cleaning artifacts," Jablonski said, explaining why they make these risky dives for researchers.

Archaeologists said the rewards are great despite the risks to the divers.

"The fact that they are diving in that deep water, it is pushing the limits of the technology in a way I welcome very much," said Felipe Castro, a professor of nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University not with the project.

The divers found many important pieces needed to tell the ship's story, said Alba Mazza, an Italian archaeologist with the University of Sydney in Australia. Of note were the ship's anchor and a sacrificial altar with Greek inscriptions that provide clues to the ship's origin. The size and shape of the amphora help them understand what the ship was carrying.

Experts believe it could have been from the Italian region around Naples, which Mazza described as "very rich and wealthy, with lots of nice wine in that area."

Another possibility Mazza and Tusa are investigating is whether the ship was a supply vessel in the fleet of Claudio Marcello, a Roman consul who conquered Sicilian city of Syracuse in 212 B.C.

GUE divers were paid through corporate contributions to its "Project Baseline," an endeavor in which divers and citizen scientists throughout the world submit data from myriad underwater sites that future researchers can use to compare and track changes. In addition to working on the wreck, Project Baseline divers around the world are surveying reefs and caves, including a deep sea cave off France.

In the case of the Panarea III shipwreck, the data collected from the site can be used by the Italian government or others in the future.

Much more research is needed before the team can be sure about many of its early hunches about the Panarea III, but with help from GUE the crew plans to return next year to the site for more dive work.

Jablonski can hardly wait.

"Reaching the dive site was a mystical experience and very much like reaching through a window in time," he said.

So we have an approximately 50-foot long merchant ship with what looks like a cargo of oils and/or wines and perhaps foodstuffs.  The continued existence of the cargo would suggest it was not a victim of pirates, but (as conjectured) a victim of weather and/or poor navigation.

[Imperial Dave]

thanks for the link Patrick. I wonder how many more of these types of wrecks are waiting to be discovered ie deep water ones not subject to the normal discovery and potential looting cycle

[Patrick Waterson]

It is an encouraging thought - for us, anyway.  Less so for the original ships' crews, but they will have moved on by now.

Deep water wrecks may also preserve timbers from the depredations of teredo navalis, the 'teredo worm' or 'shipworm' (actually a burrowing mollusc) which was traditionally the bane of anything wet and wooden.  The teredo worm is a littoral creature and not happy with depths below 200 feet or so.  It cannot grow at temperatures below 52 Fahrenheit (11 Celsius) and also can only remain male in such low temperatures (all teredo navalis are born male; some change to female in warmer waters), hence being unable to breed.

What would be nice would be a few ships preserved with attached rams and some weaponry and armour used by marines.  The best bet for this might be if some of the Roman vessels destroyed during the great storms of the First Punic War had somehow found resting places below 300 feet or so.

[Imperial Dave]

thats a good point re the preservation effects of deep water resting places for wooden ships. I think I read somewhere that in addition to less nibblers (your worms erm so to speak ), the lower temperature slows general decay (bacteria, enzymes etc slow down as the temperature drops and the closer to zero the better) as well as lower oxygen levels

[Erpingham]

Deeper water surveying seems to have increased in recent years as technology has improved.  I recall a couple of years ago a survey of deep Black Sea wrecks, some of which were ancient.  Perhaps more exciting is deep diving techniques are moving forward, allowing professional divers (but not less well equipped looters) to survey and sample the wrecks.

[Imperial Dave]

Atmospheric diving suits are improving all the time and the cost, albeit still very high, is coming down.

Having said that, the latest "iron man" diving suit was reportedly said to cost £600K before support equipment is added in

[Andreas Johansson]

I think I read somewhere that in addition to less nibblers (your worms erm so to speak ), the lower temperature slows general decay (bacteria, enzymes etc slow down as the temperature drops and the closer to zero the better) as well as lower oxygen levels

As a general thing, biological and chemical processes proceed more slowly at lower temperatures. They keep slowing down all the way down to absolute zero, but the phase change at 0°C brings its own dangers so a deep freeze can be a mixed blessing.

[Imperial Dave]

I think I read somewhere that in addition to less nibblers (your worms erm so to speak ), the lower temperature slows general decay (bacteria, enzymes etc slow down as the temperature drops and the closer to zero the better) as well as lower oxygen levels

As a general thing, biological and chemical processes proceed more slowly at lower temperatures. They keep slowing down all the way down to absolute zero, but the phase change at 0°C brings its own dangers so a deep freeze can be a mixed blessing.

agreed, sometimes (although in the context of underwater finds not likely to happen), freezing conditions can cause more damage than preservation due to expanding ice crystals within the cellular matrices of whatever it is you want to recover!

[Sharur]

Not sure if this is the survey you meant Anthony (it's from 2008). There's a more detailed commentary on it, with photos, available as a free PDF download via this page as well.

The Black Sea's particularly important as a location for shipwrecks because its deeper anoxic region protects them from any living organisms requiring oxygen to function.

[Erpingham]

That was indeed the work I was referring to.  Just forgotten quite how long ago it was.