Shipwrecked!: Chapter Two

Aras had said that within the wreck he had seen a number of large copper ingots and that he had actually recovered a bronze knife. “What if those copper ingots and that bronze knife were from…a sea trader of the time of Odysseus and the Trojan wars?”

And he had a unique conviction. He was certain that a shipwreck could be excavated with the same scientific care and precision as archaeologists working on land.

“I was convinced,” he stated, “that the seabed contained memories of maritime civilizations that had never been recorded. What historians had missed, the sea remembered.”

He then contacted Professor Rodney Young at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and asked him if the museum would undertake an excavation of the Gelidonya shipwreck.

Bass, whose main interest was the Mediterranean Bronze Age, was at first overwhelmed by the opportunity. “Here I am,” he recalled, “sent out from [the University of Pennsylvania] never having dived before, and…I’m the director.” He might have been a bit dumbfounded but Bass never hesitated in accepting the challenge.

“Nothing much could be preserved underwater,” they declared, adding that “it’s not possible to execute proper archaeological plans underwater.”

But instead of being discouraged, he left for the shipwreck site determined to prove the “experts” wrong. “I had no inkling,” he would write, “that my life was changing forever.”

The camp, set up on a narrow strip of beach that ran beneath Gelidonya’s high cliffs, was sweltering hot and primitive, to say the least.

It had been difficult to attract funding. So our camp for eight people was mostly what Peter and I scrounged from a US Air Force base near Istanbul: part of a canvas mess tent, some discarded cot mattresses, torn parachutes we strung up for shade.

Made up of archaeologists and divers from France, England, and the United States, this multinational group included Frederic Dumas, on loan from Jacques Cousteau’s team of divers, and the pioneering archaeologist Honor Frost.

The one guiding principle that Bass established in the first days of the expedition, Throckmorton would recall, “was that we were there to understand the site, not recover a lot of stuff. Until something on the bottom was understood in its relationship to everything else, it stayed on the bottom. Recovery could take place only when everything on the site was well recorded.…”

In the first meticulous mapping of an ancient shipwreck on the ocean floor, one that would become a model for all future successful underwater excavations, Bass’s team began by making precise measurements and detailed drawings of everything in and around the wreck.

Eventually, the entire area looked like a conventional land excavation with areas that needed to be explored staked out in squares, poles inserted next to spots that had been thoroughly examined, and plastic tags with numbers on them attached to all visible artifacts.

Eventually, the entire area looked like a conventional land excavation with areas that needed to be explored staked out in squares, poles inserted next to spots that had been thoroughly examined, and plastic tags with numbers on them attached to all visible artifacts.

Once ashore, preliminary removal of the concretion that covered most of the artifacts from their centuries-long home on the ocean floor was begun.

And it revealed an amazing array of Bronze Age objects.

The discovery that copper and tin could be combined to form a new and stronger metal, called bronze, changed the course of human history. Tools and weapons made of this extraordinary alloy began to replace those previously made of wood, stone, bone, and copper.

Because bronze was so much stronger than metals previously used, shipbuilders could now construct hulls carrying more cargo than ever before.

It also meant that the discovery of the shipwreck at Cape Gelidonya was extraordinarily important, not only because of the age of the sunken vessel and the groundbreaking way it was excavated but also because of the artifacts it yielded.

They lay on the ocean floor, still stacked as they had been in the ship’s hull, and next to them lay the remnants of tin ingots.

It was the first time in history that the twin ingredients of bronze—copper and tin—had ever been found in close proximity to each other, on land or at the bottom of the sea.

Along with the copper and tin ingots, the ship was also carrying a large number of wicker baskets filled with several hundred bronze tools, several of which had signs scratched on them indicating that they had been made in Cyprus.

Included were broken parts of picks, hoes, shovels, and axes. Bass and the other archaeologists concluded the merchant captain of the ship used these broken implements as scrap bronze, which he or someone else could melt down to make brand-new tools.

Other items recovered from the Gelidonya wreck included four scarabs (gems containing a carved image of a beetle held sacred in the ancient Mediterranean world), a stone seal used by Near Eastern merchants to sign documents, two stone mortars, an oil lamp, a bronze razor, a cooking spit, several whetstones, and the bones of animals, fish, and fowl.

Other items recovered from the Gelidonya wreck included four scarabs (gems containing a carved image of a beetle held sacred in the ancient Mediterranean world), a stone seal used by Near Eastern merchants to sign documents, two stone mortars, an oil lamp, a bronze razor, a cooking spit, several whetstones, and the bones of animals, fish, and fowl.

He would probably go ashore often, set up a portable foundry on the beach, and fashion the tools and weapons that had been ordered using the scrap bronze that he had onboard.

Of the greatest importance of all is the fact that what was discovered ninety feet beneath the sea at Cape Gelidonya dramatically changed ages-old archaeologists’ and historians’ theories and perceptions about who had dominated the trading waters of the Mediterranean during the middle to late Bronze Age.

Before the Cape Gelidonya excavation took place, historians and archaeologists believed that Bronze Age Greeks known as Mycenaeans had monopolized merchant seafaring along the Mediterranean from about 1400 to 1200 BCE.

There they pored through every book and journal on Egyptian art and found sixteen illustrations of reliefs and tomb paintings that showed Bronze Age workers carrying ingots shaped exactly like the main cargo of the Gelidonya ship.

For Bass, this evidence was supported by the fact that none of the objects recovered were Mycenaean. The scarabs, oil lamp, mortars, and seal were all Canaanite.

“Why,” asked Bass, “does a Mycenaean ship have nothing but [Canaanite] weights? Why were the personal effects all [Canaanite]? All of this pointed to the fact that whoever sailed this ship was Canaanite.”

National Geographic stated it best: what had taken place at Cape Gelidonya, it proclaimed, was like nothing “that came before it—it would literally change our notion of archaeology and the ocean forever.”

His previous work included helping excavate a land site at Gordion, Turkey, which, in the eighth century BCE, had been the capital of King Midas’s fabled golden empire.

In 1972, in order to both develop and promote marine archaeology, Bass founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, the first organization of its kind in the world.

Originally located on the island of Cyprus, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology soon moved to the campus of Texas A&M, where it has flourished ever since.

Led by Bass and staffed by scientists, researchers, engineers, and people from many other disciplines, the INA has been a leading force in underwater archaeology.

In carrying out their underwater discoveries and excavations, Bass and his colleagues introduced groundbreaking inventions and techniques that greatly advanced how marine archaeology is conducted.

Among the most spectacular of their early innovations was a plastic dome called a “telephone booth” that contained air pumped from the surface and a telephone that enabled divers at various ocean depths to enter it, remove their masks, and communicate with those aboard the dive boat on the ocean surface.

Along with everything else he accomplished, Bass was a prolific author and the recipient of many scientific awards.

Together, they created a deluxe valve system that supplies divers with compressed air. This invention, which enabled safer and deeper dives than ever before possible, became known as the Aqualung (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus or SCUBA).