Using technology developed to fight the Cold War, a team of oceanographers, archaeologists and engineers have discovered a graveyard of ancient ships sunk in the Mediterranean Sea as long as 2,200 years ago.
Using a deep-diving Navy submarine and a robotic submersible, the team found, mapped, diagrammed and recovered more than 100 artifacts from five ships dated to the Roman era, plus three more modern vessels, all strewn across a 20-square-mile section of sea floor a half-mile deep.The expedition, led by oceanographer Robert Ballard, discoverer of the resting place of the Titanic, reported its finds Wednesday during a news conference at the National Geographic Society, a sponsor, in Washington, D.C.
Ballard, president of the newly formed Institute for Exploration, in Mystic, Conn., said the six-week survey establishes that ancient sailors were not all a coast-hugging, island-hopping breed but were able and willing to venture across long stretches of deep, open ocean to take the shortest route between two points.
"The impression of coastal sailing has been established because all the wrecks we've found have been in shallow waters, but that's because until recently that's the only place we were able to look," Ballard said.
Using the wide-scanning sonar of the Navy's NR-1 deep-diving research submarine, the team was able to search thousands of square yards of ocean floor at a time for wrecks.
"They were finding a Roman-era wreck every other day, so many we finally called them off," Ballard said of the nuclear-powered sub, which the Navy has turned increasingly to civilian research from its original mission of snooping on Russian undersea operations.
Using an array of instruments mounted on the Woods Hole Ocean-o-graph-ic Institute's diving drone Jason, scientists were able to plot the dimensions of each wreck in as little as an hour, work that in shallower water has taken human divers months and years to accomplish. After that, the submersible's mechanical arms were used to put relics into collection baskets, which were then floated to the surface for preservation and study.
The remains of the cargo ships about 100 miles off the Tunisian coast are astride a trade route between two superpowers of the first century B.C. - Rome and Carthage - fierce rivals that warred off and on for more than a century before Rome finally conquered and destroyed the North African city-state. That opened the way for Rome to build an empire, which eventually incorporated every piece of land watered by the Mediterranean and then some, with Roman maps arrogantly but accurately labeling it "Mare Nostrum" - "Our Sea."
The oldest ship found by the expedition apparently foundered within a century of Carthage's demise and rebirth as a Roman port. Some 100 feet in length, its cargo included thousands of double-handled earthenware storage jugs called amphora that probably contained wine, oil, fish sauce, fruit preserves and other commodities. The ship also may have carried as many as 100 passengers on its crowded deck, said Anna Marguerite McCann of Boston University, head archaeologist for the expedition.