Maritime Heritage
"It is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man will in the course of ages be collected together in the bed of the oceans, than will exist at any one time on the surface of the Continents."
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1832).
*
The world's oceans are the Earth's last uncharted frontier. Water covers 71% of our planet, yet over an estimated 90% is unexplored. Before the rise of the airplane, the miracle of wood on societies' ability to communicate was not that it burnt but that it floated. Virtually anything and everything produced by the hand of man traveled by sea down the centuries. UNESCO estimates that 3 million shipwrecks have been lost at sea since the dawn of sail. Wreck Watch Int. calculates that approximately 23% of these foundered beyond the sight of land - 600,000 wrecks may litter the 'abyss'.
Largely too deep to be recovered before the widespread availability of SCUBA in 1948, shipwrecks have subsequently yielded everything from Roman medicines and bronze statues to prefabricated Byzantine churches, golf clubs, pots of all ages by the tens of thousands and 'treasures' of gold and silver.
Shipwrecks are often envisaged through rose-tinted spectacles to be perfectly preserved, as if frozen in time. The truth is a far cry from this marine Eden. As a founding figure of underwater archaeology, Peter Throckmorton, observed in 1970 in Shipwrecks and Archaeology. The Unharvested Sea, "It is probably safe to say that there are no visible wrecks on the Spanish, French, or Italian coasts under less than one hundred and fifty feet of water which have not been looted and fairly well destroyed." This is no scaremongering. Up to 1987 UNESCO reported that of 400 Greek and Roman shipwrecks found off France in the previous 20 years, all but three had been pillaged before the authorities reached them. To this list of problematic plunder today may be added Croatia, Montenegro and Israel.
- Off Majorca a group of local divers discovered about 600 Roman amphoras in 1964 at a depth of 35 metres, with lead ingots stacked along the keel. The ship was dynamited and 400 ingots looted and melted down.
- In the 1960s, 700 objects from a rare 3rd century BC amphora wreck, including black-gloss bowls from Campagna, were looted by local divers at a depth of 60-90 metres off the Lipari Islands, Sicily. Professor Luigi Bernabo Brea, the regional archaeological superintendent, informed the government that the wreck would not survive another year. In desperation, the Italian authorities offered one-third of the finds to any institution that could excavate the ship.
- In the 1970s, 3 tons of extraordinary Late Bronze Age ingots dating to c. 1400 BC - a form of Canaanite currency - were looted from Israel's Carmel coast and sold to a automobile dealer in Haifa, who melted the artefacts down to fill holes in car radiators. Despite stringent antiquities laws in Israel forbidding any removal of cultural heritage from the Mediterranean Sea pre-dating the year 1700, looters continue to pillage the 230 kilometre-long coast of the Holy Land. Government officials calculate that over 60% of all existing shipwreck finds in Israeli waters have already been illegally recovered and that very little of the country's underwater patrimony will survive by 2012.
- In 1980 the only known bronze ram from a Greek or Hellenistic warship was found in the bay of Atlit, Israel. This 465-kilogram, 2.3-metre-long 2nd-century BC classical 'ballistic missile' was not in its original find spot, but had been cut away from its hull by fishermen and dragged into shallow waters to be melted down. The ram is today on display in the National Maritime Museum, Haifa. The location of the incredibly important warship itself - the only example known from the Mediterranean world - meanwhile remains lost to science.
- In modern Croatia, well-preserved ancient cargoes that remain undisturbed by treasure hunters are so rare that when they are detected government officials lock them away inside 4 metre-high iron cages coated in anti-corrosion paint to protect them from professional looters, as with an intact Roman wreck off the island of Pag in 2004.
- Safeguarding shipwrecks is expensive and logistically complex. Most heritage bodies acknowledge that protection can only be highly selective because decay and destruction are natural and unavoidable. English Heritage is consciously transparent about the national problem. The country's 45 protected wreck sites represent a tiny proportion of the 32,777 pre-1945 wrecks and recorded casualties known to lie in its territorial sea. Nevertheless, some 22% of these formally protected wreck sites are at high risk in the short term and 20% are at medium risk.
- Odyssey Marine Exploration's deep-sea survey of the English Channel and Western Approaches between 2005 and 2008 - the most extensive offshore archaeological survey conducted worldwide - discovered 267 shipwrecks dating between the mid-17th century and modern day in depths of up to 190 metres in an area of 4,725 square nautical miles. This pioneering study identified 115 wrecks (43%) that had been disturbed, including every single wooden site, and partly or in some cases comprehensively destroyed by deep-sea trawlers and scallop dredges. For the first time the massive scale of the offshore fishing industry was proven to affect profoundly the preservation of wrecks of major archaeological importance. The research has enormous repercussions for maritime heritage across the world's seas subjected to similar fishing impacts.
The Yenikapi excavations within the former port of Constantinople, Turkey.
An 11th-century AD shipwreck at Yenikapi,the former port of Constantinople,Turkey. Unknowingly built on unstable foundations or volcanic fault lines, many of the world's great ports that once connected farmers and factories with merchants and markets lie beneath the waves today or are land-locked under silted bays. Roman villa mosaics and breakwaters are submerged in the Bay of Naples in the shadow of Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius. King Herod's Caesarea in Israel, the world's first artificial harbour, crafted out of hydraulic concrete, pozzolana, slumped 5-10 metres beneath the waves within 100 years of being built. In a race against time, in 2007-8 750 workers and 50 archaeologists toiled around the clock to record the port of Byzantine Constantinople in Istanbul and its 27 6th-11th century shipwrecks before a new $2.6 billion metro line catapults the communications of the great capital of the Eastern Roman Empire into the 21st century.
The population of Earth currently stands at 6.3 billion. By the year 2050 it is expected to rise to 9 billion. The greatest museum in the world, idling on the bottom of the world's seas, is still largely an unknown entity whose wonders are closed to us. Some shipwrecks are safely cocooned in metres of sand and mud. But a vast slice is being eroded away by natural forces and, increasingly more swiftly, by the pressures of development - oil pipelines, deep-sea fishing, cable laying and sand dredging. Not every shipwreck and port can or should be saved. A small percentage, however, must be recorded and protected before it disappears forever - a reflection of the past for the understanding of the present and future.
Kurt Raveh, co-director of the 1st century AD 'Jesus Boat' excavation, Sea of Galilee. The boat was re-floated by being sprayed with polyurethane foam.
Last Updated (Thursday, 10 February 2011 18:30)