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1. 34
Oldest
excavated
shipwreck
dates to
Middle
Bronze Age
Opposite page: Off Turkish
coast near Sheytan Deresi,
divers find unbroken storage jar
estimated to be 3,500 years
old. (Robin C. M. Piercy)
The Wreck at
Archaeology in the Mediterranean em-
f".braces a number of specialties. One
is preclassical archaeology, the study of
remains from the Stone, Bronze and Iron
Ages, before the rise of Classical Greece.
Another is nautical archaeology, the study
of ancient ships and harbors. If new
discoveries continue at their present
rate, however, there may soon be a new
area of specialization: preclassical nautical
archaeology.
I was fortunate, as a student of Bronze
Age archaeology, to have begun in nau-
tical archaeology in 1960 by excavating,
with my colleague Peter Throckmorton,
the first preclassical shipwreck ever found.
We raised a ton of metal cargo from the
wreck, located by Throckmorton the
previous year, lying at a depth of one
hundred feet off Cape Gelidonya, Turkey.
Dating from the end of the late Bronze
Age, about 1200 e.c., it was the oldest
wreck then known, as well as being the
first excavated scientifically and com-
pletely on the seabed: its historical im-
portance, when identified as Canaanite or
early Phoenician, was immense.
I was doubly fortunate to have since
found and excavated an even older cargo,
from the end of the Middle Bronze Age;
and Throckmorton, more recently, has for
the second time discovered the "oldest
known shipwreck" - this one from the
Early Bronze Age, in Greek waters.
This is the story of the Middle Bronze
Age ship.
Between 1960 and 1973, I divided my
time between preclassical and nautical
studies, directing underwater excavations
of Roman and Byzantine shipwrecks in
Turkey, while teaching preclassical ar-
chaeology at the University of Pennsyl-
vania, and working on Bronze Age and
Neolithic land sites in Greece and Italy. In
1973, a number of us decided to devote our
full time to shipwrecks by establishing
the American Institute of Nautical Ar-
chaeology (AINA).
AINA's first task was to discover new
wreck sites worthy of excavation. With
permission from the Turkish government,
up to ten of us at a time sailed the rocky
coast of Asia Minor on the thirty-five-foot
fishing boat Gunyel, some of us sleeping on
the open deck and others curled up in
a tiny cabin crammed with side-scan-
ning sonar and underwater television
equipment. At the end of six weeks we
were discouraged. All of our sonar targets
save one had proved to be only rock out-
crops protruding from the relatively flat
seabed. The unpromising exception was in
a murky bay, with visibility so limited that
divers could examine the site only by feel;
a few pieces of broken pottery, grappled
blindly from the mud seventy feet below,
suggested the wreck to be Late Roman or
Byzantine.
Without at least one good shipwreck to
excavate, our new institute's future looked
dim, and by then our survey funds from
the National Geographic Society were
nearly depleted. In desperation we asked
the Society for a small supplemental grant,
and prepared to head out to sea again.
With the news that the supplemental
grant had been approved, and with the
arrival from America of our new recom-
pression chamber for treatment of poten-
tial cases of the bends, we were ready to
dive in other, deeper areas where local
fishermen and spongers told us they had
raised pottery from the sea. We had al-
ready moved from the Gunyel to the six-
ty-five-foot trawler Kardesler, and covered
her deck with air banks, compressors,
chamber and diving equipment.
Our best guide was Mehmet Ashkin, a
retired sponge diver, who led us first to a
marvelous Byzantine wreck, its cargo of
wine jars half covered with deep sand that
almost certainly preserves substantial hull
OCEANS
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•

2. Sheytan Deresi
JANUARY 1977
By George F. Bass
remains. He then showed us a ca rgo of
Late Byzantine glass: solid glass ingots lay
mixed with delicate glass vessels of purple,
yellow and green. Following his directions
we found, only a hundred feet away, a
wreck of the Late Classica l or ea rly Hel-
lenistic period, a vessel also well covered
by a deep layer of protective sand .
O ur survey was already a success, but
we continued to dive. In about a month we
saw cargos of Hellenistic bowls and lamps,
Roman plates, and roof tiles of va rious
ages - fifteen wrecks in all - between
Bodrum and Antalya.
Six of us comprised the diving team:
three America ns and three Turks. O ne of
the Turkish divers, Cumhur llik, formerly
a young sailor on a boat used in the Cape
Gelidonya excavation, had since become a
sponge diver, and now operates a tourist
boat out of Bodrum. l asked him, after he
had shown us a cargo of Hellenistic tiles, if
he knew of other wrecks. He sa id he did
not, but recalled seeing two " huge jars"
during a dive fo r sponges seven yea rs ear-
lier; we did not consider them worth a
visit, but marked on our chart their ap-
proximate location near Sheytan Deresi.
In the final days of our voyage, we sailed
toward a Roman wreck our captain had
learned of some time earlier. Before we
reached the site, however, the sun was al-
ready low in the October sky. None of us
looked forward to a cold, evening dive.
We had grown weary of eating late,
clammy suppers on the Knrdes/er's open
deck before crawling, still damp, into her
hold to sleep. Yi.iksel Egdemir, commis-
sioner from the Turkish Department of
Antiquities, suggested we might instead
have a look at Cumhur's "huge jars," not-
ing we were just then passing Sheytan
Deresi. W e could continue to the Roman
wreck, still an hour or more away, in the
morning. We all agreed.
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3. 36
Cumhur, with
uncanny memory
and sense of
direction
underwater, led
us directly to the
jars he had seen
only once, seven
years before.
"The sun was ,iiready
low in the October sky."
If th e ex ped ition had reached
Sheytan Deresi a few hours
earl ier it would not have stopped
to investigate the wreck.
(John Broadwater)
Cumhur, with uncanny memory and
sense of direction under water, had no
difficulty in leading Yiiksel and me dir-
ectly to the jars he had seen only once,
seven years before. They lay, half buried
in sand, at the base of a rocky slope 110
feet deep. Yiiksel excitedly wrote W-R-
E-C-K on the palm of one hand with the
index finger of the other, and I nodded
agreement.
Next morning we dived in three two-
man teams to inspect and photograph the
site. I noticed the fragments of an amphora
(two-handled jar), and for the first time
suspected the date of the pottery.
During the prescribed interval between
multiple dives in a single day to avoid the
bends, I began a letter to the AINA boa rd
of directors:
" What is driving us mad is that I feel
positive that the amphora is Bronze Age
. .. So we wait and wait and the minutes
tick by so slowly until we can dive again in
the afternoon. Lying down below us may
well be a wreck older than that at Ca pe
Gelidonya - making it the oldest known
shipwreck in the world ."
That night I added a note:
" Writing by kerosene lamp on the deck
of the Knrdesler Yes, the wreck is,
without any doubt, Bronze Age. I suspect
it may well be older than the Cape
Gelidonya wreck."
After plotting their positions on the
seabed, we raised the two jars as well as a
few scattered fragments of pottery, both
for dating purposes and to protect them
from possible looters who might learn of
the site. Next day, after diving on the
Roman wreck that first had brought us to
this stretch of coast, we ended the survey.
Funds were gone, and winter weather was
approaching.
The rest of the story was not immedi-
ately happy. I discussed drawings of the
pottery with colleagues in Turkey and
Cyprus, and sent photographs of all raised
pieces to experts in America, England and
Greece. Not one agreed that the wreck was
as old as the Bronze Age, and some sug-
gested it was later than the Iron Age. I
concluded my dating was based on wish-
ful thinking, and wrote a few months later
in J,-c/i aeology Beneatli the Sen (Walker and
Company) that the pottery was probably
from the seventh century o.c.
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4. •.
Still, it was worth excavating. With
grants from the National Geographic
Society, SCM Corporation, the Triopian
Foundation, the Alcoa Foundation, F. Alex
Nason, and Harrison Eiteljorg, we re-
turned to Turkey in 1974 for a full-sca le
excavation. Before making a single dive on
the wreck, however, the Cyrpus W ar
erupted, ending most archaeological ex-
cavations in Turkey, Greece and Cyrpus.
A year passed befo re we were able to
return to the wreck we had seen so briefly.
With funds remaining from 1974, and an
additional grant from the National Geo-
graphic Society, we bega n the excavation
in September of 1975 with a staff which
included a number of AINA veterans and
seven Turkish students we taught to dive.
O ur diving platform was a fi fty-foot
wooden barge, anchored directly over the
site, its deck laden with high-pressure and
low-pressure compressors, air banks, a
recompression chamber, and storage racks
for suits, regulators, fins, masks, and other
diving equipment. O ur first job was to
lower onto the site our underwater tele-
phone booth, an air-filled plexiglass
hemisphere held down by four legs bolted
to metal ballast plates. This allowed divers
to stand inside, dry from their chests up,
and talk to the barge by telephone, or di-
rectly to one another.
Next we fa bricated and lowered onto
the site a rigid metal grid whose dimen-
sions grew as excavation progressed. The
grid enabled us to make an accurate plan
of the cargo as it was uncovered by a pair
of air lifts, or suction pipes. We had used
more sophisticated mapping techniques,
including underwater stereophotogram-
metry, on other wrecks, but these were not
required at Sheytan Deresi where we
needed to record, by drawings and photo-
graphs, only the distribution of pottery
fragments. To our great disappointment,
we found no trace of hull remains in the
sand that covered the pottery, although it
was deep enough to have protected wood
from marine borers that would otherwise
have consumed it.
We assumed that the ancient ship had
capsized. Sheytan Deresi deserves its
name - literally " Devil Creek" - a place
still treated with respect by sailors. Wind,
suddenly and without warning, howled
down a deep valley and out to sea, hitting
our boats with unexpected blasts as, in
calm seas, we rounded the last point into
its path . The wreck lay just off that point.
Mehmet Turguttekin, the Knrdesler's cap-
JANUARY 1977
tain, told us he had seen a waterspout
there when he was a boy.
O nly one complete storage jar, other
than those raised in 1973, was fou nd, and
it lay nearly a hundred feet away from the
main concentration of pottery, on the
rocky slope above. Had it floated free,
empty, when disaster struck, or had it
toppled from the ancient ship in a roll
which preceded the loss of the rest of the
cargo? We also discovered a handle and a
few fragments of pottery, identical to
those beneath our grid, in shallow water
by the rocky coast a hundred yards away.
Had the ship, most of her cargo spilled,
ended up aga inst the rocks there, or did
this represent another floating jar? All we
can be certain of is that the main area of
shards was too concentrated to represent
pottery containers tossed overboard to
lighten a stricken vessel. We have no
doubt that a naval tragedy took place.
The plan of the site presented another
puzzle. Each pot shard had been num-
bered carefully on the seabed so that it
could be identified first on the plan, and
later when in position, as part of a reas-
sembled jar. O ne shard found inside the
storage jar lying one hundred feet away
from the rest, perfectly fitted a shard
found beneath the grid. Most groups of
shards represented single jars, smashed in
situ, but in the midst of such a group we
often found a single shard from a jar
whose other fragments lay fa r distant and
separated by rock outcrops, precluding
movement by currents. The shards were
Dr. Bass surfa ces
after helping
to raise one of
the large jars.
(John Broadwater)
Two years
after discovering
the first jars,
we still
did not know
the age of the
wreck.
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5. 38
Top: Knrdeslt•r was
ancho red just off the point
sti ll respected by
sailo rs fo r its sudden winds.
Below: Crew of Knrdes/er
ca rries a jar to museum housed
in the Crusades' Castle at Bodrum.
(J ohn Broadwater)
too deeply buried to have been disturbed
by modern divers, and we cannot explain
their positions e ither by their having been
broken in the ancient boat before falling to
the seabed, o r by having been moved by
octopods (although it is likely that the one
shard mentioned above was carried to the
distant storage jar by an octopus that made
its home there some time in the past).
O ur base camp, surrounded by a grove
of pine trees, consisted of a tent village not
far fro m the site. O ne tent served as a
darkroom for nightly development and
printing of photographs. A more sturdy,
screened structure, with concrete floor,
provided adequate shelter for work on
plans, and the piecing together of hun-
dreds of pottery fragments, a task made
more difficult by crumbling edges and the
lack of any painted decoration. Pot mend -
ing and restoration was completed in the
Bodrum Museum .
The entire cargo comprised four storage
jars, each nearly three and a half feet tall;
three slightly smaller two-handled storage
jars (not including the fragments of one or
more others in shallow water near the
shore); three slender amphoras about
thirty inches high; three sq ua t amphoras
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6. •
with handles on their bellies; a large
krater, or mixing bowl, nearly two feet in
diameter; two one-handled jugs approx-
imately a foot and a half tall; and part of
what may have been a three-handled
water jar.
It was not a large cargo, but sufficient to
have filled some of the small coasters still
plying these waters. Because we did not
discover any lamps, cooking wares, and
similar items found on virtually all ancient
shipwrecks, we surmised that the boat was
not going a great distance, and may have
been carrying its wares from one neigh-
boring village to another.
At the conclusion of excavation, the ex-
citement of discovery still eluded us. Two
years after Camhur had showed us the two
" huge jars," we still did not know the age
of the wreck. A month of library research
left me undecided between a Bronze Age
and an Iron Age date.
I then wrote to Sinclair Hood, one of the
English excavators at Knossos, site of the
palace of the legendary King Minos whose
name archaeologists use for denoting the
Bronze Age on Crete. Hood referred to
Middle Minoan pottery parallels from
around 1600 s.c., and pointed out that our
JANUARY 1977
Left: Gay Piercy draws the amphora
that first suggested Middle Bronze
Age date. The shape closely resem-
bles those excavated zn Turkey.
Below: Robin Piercy and Ann Bass
work on final restoration of artifacts
in Bodrum Museum of Underwater
Archaeology. (John Cassi/s)
jugs were shaped like some found in con-
temporaneous levels at Troy. Shortly af-
terward l met with James Mellaart, a lead-
ing authority on Anatolian archaeology at
London University. He noticed immedi-
ately the significance of the slit handle
bases on several of our jars, jars of a type
he had excavated at Beycesultan, in west-
ern Turkey, in strata he dated between
1650 and 1550 s.c. Further research has
reinforced this dating to around 1600 s.c.,
the end of the Middle Bronze Age.
Our pottery is not identical to either that
found in Crete or in western Asia Minor,
but shows influences from both areas. As
this was a time when other archaeological
finds indicate that M inoan traders from
Crete had reached the western coast of
Anatolia, the mixed character of a small,
local cargo is not unusual. l suspect the
pottery was fired at some still undis-
covered center on the Turkish coast, and
was being shipped only a short distance
when it was fost. Its recovery adds another
clue to the influences that shaped Bronze
Age cultures, which in turn were the
foundations of Western Civilization. ;;ii;
Dr. George F. Bass is Professor of Geography
and Anthropology at T exas A&M University,
and president of the American Institute of
Nautical Archaeology. He is the author of four
books, including Archaeology Brnea//1 the Sea: A
Personal A ffo1111/.
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