The Gape Gelidonya excavation page on the Institute of Nautical Archaeology site is an excellent resource for summaries of the artifacts, techniques and project history. It can be visited by navigating to http://inadiscover.com/ and clicking on 'Virtual Museum' in the left hand column. INA is redesigning their website so eventually this link will change to http://inadiscover.com, which is currently undergoing testing.
We began class by briefly reviewing what archaeology is and why professionalism and rigorous standards are important to the field. Recently, Odyssey Marine, a treasure hunting company out of Tampa, Florida has received a lot of media attention due to their new television program, "Treasure Quest" on the Discovery Channel, and their recent discovery of HMS Victory.
Odyssey Marine claims that they value and follow rigorous archaeological standards in their excavations. Unfortunately, this involves searching for "valuable" shipwrecks and looting them - typically of gold and silver coins. Thus every few months the news media erupts with the new discovery of a shipwreck found with "hundreds of millions" or "billions" of dollars of gold and silver coins. The public is left with the impression that treasure hunting must be a very lucrative business. The reality though is that these "billion dollar" claims are highly exaggerated. Odyssey and other such companies promise huge returns on their investments. Unfortunately for their investors, Odyssey Marine - a publicly-traded company - has been posting a loss for the last three years. I guess their' a sucker born every minute.
If you watch Treasure Quest, you will see how Odyssey's employees claim to be carrying out legitimate archaeological excavations to the same exacting standards set by professional nautical archaeologists. They will also claim that they are the only people with the money and resources to explore these wrecks, and that if they did not excavate them, they would be lost to history forever. Nothing could be further from the truth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT9katSsQeg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxNy-7D1B9A
Odyssey keeps their find locations secret. Other than the initial reports published in the media of "treasure wrecks" being found, virtually nothing more is actually learned from these important resources that they are destroying. Archaeological sites can only be excavated once. Unless you leave a portion of the site unexcavated, the material you dig up can never be looked at again in its original context. Therefore, when you excavate a site, you must record as much information as possible while you are doing it, becausde if you don't, that information will be lost forever. Treasure hunting companies often use extremely distructive methods to recover gold from wrecks which oftn destroy the very fragile remains of the ship's structure. Very little can be learned archaeologically from a pile of gold coins, but the other artifacts, the distribution of the cargo, and the remains of the ship itself can tell us a great deal about the lives of past seafarers. We know surprisingly little about certain specific details of ship construction during the Age of Exploration, and if treasure hunting companies continue to destroy these wrecks, we might never learn.
A Brief History of Underwater Archaeology
Archaeology essentially began after the Renaissance, when Europeans began rediscovering the past, especially the Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Initially this took the form of visiting archaeological sites and collecting antiquities to display and show off to one's friends. Professional archaeology developed in the 19th century by developing research questions, standards, and methodologies that enabled researches to answer specific questions about the past. Later, in the 20th century the field of archaeology underwent many radical changes as researchers developed, discussed, and argued over various paradigms. The underlying theme of this time though was the importance placed on rigorous methods, including the creation of detailed site maps and plotting the location of individual artifacts or clusters of artifacts in order to understand their relationship to each other, both in the horizontal sense (distribution over a given area) and the vertical sense (distribution underground, which corresponds with age).
Archaeologists recognized the plethora of archaeological material underwater, along coastlines, in lakes and in rivers. Some professional archaeologists attempted excavations of these materials, but because they were not divers themselves they did not participate directly in the excavations. Instead, they stayed ashore and directed others to do their work for them. One one hand, early 20th-century underwater excavations at Artemision and Antikythera in Greece produced wonderfully preserved examples of original Greek Bronzes, or the Mahdia wreck of Tunisia loaded with marble columns, and were considered landmark projects in the fields of Art History. On the other hand, from an archaeological persepctive, these excavations did not conform to the same standards of land excavations and thus can not be considered true professional underwater archaeological investigations.
The premiere of the Aqualung at the World Fair in Paris in 1937, coupled with the invention of the pressure regulator led to the development of Scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Aparatus) by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan in 1943. Scuba opened up the underwater world to anyone able to afford the equipment. Ethusiasts around the world jumped on the bandwagon, but it took a while for archaeologists to catch onto the trend.
The French used scuba to explore a series of wrecks in the 1950s, including Cousteau himself at the Grand-Congloué wrecks near Marseilles. However, because Cousteau and the others were not professionally-trained archaeologists, their standards of mapping and excavations were not up to the same standards as terrestrial excavations. Commander Phillippe Taillez, who investigated the Titan wreck in the late 1950s recognized the need for professional archaeologists to participate in the excavations.
Finally, in 1960, George Bass, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and professional archaeologist, travelled to the south coast of Turkey to excavate a Bronze Age shipwreck at Cape Gelidonya under the aegis of the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Remember, as a professional archaeologist:
1. You must be directly involved with excavations
2. Have knowledge of artifacts, history and culture of a region or historic period (Often, artifacts are intrusive - may not indicate accurate dates for a site).
3. The process of excavation destroys a site -> you must document work thoroughly at all stages
The Cape Gelidonya Excavation
This site was originally discovered by local Turkish sponge divers and reported to Peter Throckmorton, and anthropologically-trained American journalist who had travelled to the south coast of Turkey to write about the sponge divers and their industry in 1957-1958.
Cape of Cape Gelidonya on the south coast of Turkey
George Bass, who is nowadays credited with being the "father of nautical archaeology" and founder of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, received the National Medal of Science by the president in June of 2002 - which is the nation's highest award for lifetime achievement in the fields of scientific research. He co-founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology as well as the Nautical Archaeology Program here at Texas A&M.
The area around Cape Gelidonya is extremely treacherous and was known in ancient times as being especially dangerous. The Bronze Age ship at Cape Gelidonya probably hit a barely-submerged rock pinnacle near the island, then drifted to the north and west before finally sinking.
In the Lycian sea are the islands of Illyria, Telendos and Attelbosa, the three barren isles called Cyprae, and Dionesia, formerly called Caretha. Opposite to the promontory of Taurus [Cape Gelidonya] are the Chelionae, as many in number, and extremely dangerous to mariners.
-Pliny V.35
Some important considerations to remember regarding this excavation:
1. 1st excavation of a shipwreck in deep water in which archaeologists actually participated
2. 1st fairly complete excavation of a shipwreck underwater
3. Complete site plan to record the precise location of artifacts
4. Set standards for excavation under water
The wreck late 90ft below the surface of the Mediterranean. Divers used both surface-supplied air as well as scuba tanks. Currents were very strong, increasing the risk of kinking the air hose - which was simply a garden hose adapted for the purpose.
Ship Construction
Based on distribution of the cargo, Dr. Bass believed the ship to be 30 - 35 ft in length. More recently, the discovery of a stone anchor that weighs as much as the largest anchor on the Bronze Age wreck at Uluburun (believed to be 50 ft long) has caused a re-evaluation of the Gelidonya ship's size. By scaling the tenon found in comparison to the Uluburun tenons, one comes up with a figure of about 40ft.
Almost nothing of the hull was preserved. One important wooden piece was this tenon which reveals that the ship was built in the shell-first manner using pegged mortise and tenon joints. Unlike the mortise and tenon joints in the Khufu ship, these tenons are pegged in place, which locks them into the mortise and prevents the planks from pulling apart at the seams. This pegging replaces the lashing seen on the Khufu ship.
Primary Cargo
Most of the cargo consisted of copper ingots. 40 of these were ox-hide ingots. These are just under 2 ft. long and weight 45.5 lbs each. Prior to the Cape Gelidonya excavations it was believed that these represented the value of an oxhide, and were deliberately shaped like ox hides to show this relationship. This is just coincidence: the legs make the ingots easier to carry. These ingots were poured into moulds in wet sand.
27 of the 40 oxhide ingots carry a foundry mark, indicating that they were from Cyprus, which was one of the primary sources of copper in the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Other ingots onboard included copper bun and slab ingots, and an unknown number of tin ingots. Copper and tin are of course necessary to smelt bronze.
The ship was also carrying many baskets full of broken bronze tools, several of which had Cypriote signs scratched on them. Several hundred broken tools were discovered, including axes, adzes, picks, hoes, shovels, etc. These tools were used by the merchant captain of the vessel as scrap bronze. He would melt down the tools to make new ones, and add copper or tin from the ingots as needed.
The Ship
This wreck is dated to about 1200 B.C. The captain/master merchant was a travelling tinker who specialized in making bronze tools and weapons. He would make trips around the coats making bronze objects to order and buying up broken tools to reuse the material. He would probably go ashore often and set up a make-shift fountry on the beach using sand, clay and stones. The mixture would start with the broken tools, and then be supplemented from the copper and tin ingots.
Though the ingots were from Cyprus, the oil lamps found aboard were Syrian in origin. In additon, the baskets containing the Bronze tools were made using Near Eastern plants. The knock-off Egyptian scarabs found aboard were also a Near-Eastern/Syrian phenomenon. All signs point to a Syrian origin for the ship.