This Byzantine shipwreck transformed underwater archaeology
The experimental techniques introduced during the Yassı Ada excavation in the early 1960s by a team of young archaeologists helped revolutionize a new field of study underwater.
Tourists of any sort were an unusual sight in Bodrum in 1961. A sleepy town along the southwestern part of Türkiye (Turkey) on the Aegean Sea, it was home to around 5,000 inhabitants, one motor vehicle for public transport, and a sponge fleet, which crowded its harbor.
So when a large group of foreigners arrived with a mountain of newfangled scuba diving gear and rented a big run-down house for the summer, they were greeted with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, especially when word began to circulate that they were going to be diving on an old wreck that a local sponge diver had found a few years earlier. It lay just off Yassı Ada, a low, rocky islet about a two-hour sail away.
The group—a mix of American, British, French, and German archaeologists—was interested only in the ship’s early Byzantine history, its moldering timbers, and the cargo of amphorae that sank with it nearly 1,400 years earlier. But few locals believed them. In a sponge diving community like Bodrum, it was a given that nobody took on the risks of diving unless there was clear profit to be had. It could mean only one thing: treasure.
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“Things were becoming rather tense,” recalls Frederick van Doorninck, now 92, who was one of the archaeologists on the team. “Eventually, one of the local imams called a meeting and assured everyone that we were genuine, we really were archaeologists conducting an excavation underwater, as odd as that seemed. After that, things were much better.”
The broader academic community took a little more convincing. Although underwater or maritime archaeology is a highly respected field today, in 1961 the idea of anyone conducting a rigorous archaeological excavation on the seabed seemed laughable. “People thought this was some kind of a stunt,” says van Doorninck, who would spend the next three summers diving on the wreck.
It wasn’t that archaeologists had no interest in ships or maritime history; it just wasn’t deemed safe or practical to pursue research beneath the waves. Deep-sea diving was a risky business best left to the professionals. In 1900, when a sponge diver found an ancient wreck filled with exquisite marble and bronze statues near the island of Antikythera, the Greek government sent representatives from the Department of Antiquities to oversee the salvage. But these archaeologists remained strictly on the surface, cataloging the valuable-looking artifacts the diving professionals brought up.
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Archaeology gets wet
By the 1950s Aqua-Lung gear, developed during World War II, was making it possible for any reasonably fit person to explore under the sea. No longer did someone need a massive copper helmet, canvas suit, lead shoes, and a team operating pumps and air hoses from the surface. Treasure hunting and wreck diving became new adventure sports.
Then in 1958 an American journalist, archaeology buff, and sport diver named Peter Throckmorton traveled to Bodrum to follow up on a story about a local sponge diver who’d found a bronze statue of the Greek goddess Demeter in one of the many ancient wrecks that were strewn along the coast. Throckmorton brought along his scuba gear and spent a month living aboard a sponge boat, diving with the sponge divers, and cataloging the wrecks they encountered. Indeed, one of the local sponge boat skippers, Kemal Ares, would later become a highly valued member of the archaeology teams that would explore these wrecks.
When Throckmorton returned to the United States, he approached the archaeology department at the University of Pennsylvania with a suggestion: Why not try excavating one of these wrecks formally, just as they would an ancient tomb or temple on land? The head of the university’s museum was intrigued by the idea and agreed to fund an expedition in the summer of 1960. A postgraduate named George Bass was asked if he would like to lead it. After taking half a dozen diving lessons at his local YMCA, he left for southwestern Turkey, where he and the team excavated one of the wrecks Throckmorton had cataloged during his time with the sponge divers: a Bronze Age ship off Cape Gelidonya on the Mediterranean Sea. It was the first excavation of a sunken ship by trained archaeologists working underwater. The provenance of the copper ingots, weapons, and bronze tools found with the wreck revealed that Bronze Age seafaring and trade in the Near East was far more diverse and wider ranging than historians had suspected.
However, because so little of the Bronze Age ship remained after more than 3,200 years in the sea, the team was barely able to draft a coherent site plan—an essential part of any archaeological excavation. Like investigators at a crime scene, archaeologists start by making a detailed map of a site before so much as a trowelful of soil is moved. They measure, sketch, and photograph everything in situ. This mapping continues as the excavation progresses and each layer of earth is peeled back so that, like detectives, they can reconstruct a scene: how something was built or the precise order of events that took place around it.
And so to Bodrum and the summer of 1961. This time George Bass, his wife and archaeologist Anne Bass, and the rest of the team, many of whom would go on to be leaders in the field of underwater archaeology, were to excavate the Byzantine wreck off Yassı Ada. Van Doorninck, a classical archaeologist who’d shown talent as a draftsman on ancient Greek sites, was asked if he’d come along and draw the site plans on which the expedition’s success would ultimately depend. “If maritime archaeology was ever to be a legitimate field of archaeology, we had to be able to demonstrate that we could survey a site just as meaningfully as archaeologists do on land,” says van Doorninck. At the time, he knew next to nothing about ships or nautical architecture, but the idea interested him, and he agreed to join the team. Like nearly all the expedition members, van Doorninck was a newbie diver. “I took lessons at the YMCA, flunked the course, and had to redo it after I got to Turkey,” he recalls with a laugh. “I never did like diving, not at all, but once I was down on the wreck, I forgot about everything else. I was always the one they had to remind to go back up to the surface.”
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Trailblazing techniques
Certainly there was plenty to see and do down there. The water of the Aegean surrounding Yassı Ada had been a graveyard for ships for over a thousand years, with at least a dozen wrecks lying in its depths, victims of a hidden reef that surrounded the islet. The remains of a Roman-age wreck lay only yards from the Byzantine one they were excavating.
“The fact that the wreck we were diving on was seventh-century Byzantine was secondary,” says van Doorninck. “We chose it because it was a fairly complete shipwreck, with substantial remnants of the hull intact and its cargo of 800 amphorae all in a tight cluster, ideal for trying out techniques for surveying an archaeology site underwater.”
Working at depths of 120 feet, close to the operating limit of the Aqua-Lung equipment of the day, they spent the next three field seasons at Yassı Ada. “We were really right at the edge and improvising as we went along,” notes van Doorninck.
Using sharpened bicycle spokes to pin down remnants of excavated hull so they wouldn’t float away in the current and cutting up strips of linoleum to make tags to identify various objects, they began the painstaking work of excavating underwater. They commissioned local blacksmiths to make the scaffolding, metal grids, and towers that would allow them to photograph the site from fixed positions. “And when one prototype didn’t work, we’d learn from our mistakes and design another,” says van Doorninck.
One interested party was the U.S. Navy, although its divers were aghast to hear the archaeologists’ insouciant technique of removing their mouthpieces and using the bubbles to fill amphorae with air so they’d float to the surface. “Accurate surveying and mapping underwater had some potentially useful military applications,” says van Doorninck.
The initial rough-and-ready method of sending amphorae to the surface soon gave way to the use of sturdy metal baskets and separate inflatable balloons as the team developed new research techniques and safety measures that would become standard practice for archaeologists working underwater. And to skeptics who thought that underwater excavation would always be a second-rate version of archaeology, the team could point to the fact that divers could hover over a site, without disturbing it, and waft their hands to usher away the silt with a finesse that would be impossible on land.
Outliers though they might have been in the broader academic community, van Doorninck and his colleagues were not the only archaeologists pioneering this brave new field of underwater archaeology. In Sweden archaeologists had begun work on raising the 17th-century warship the Vasa, which had been discovered at the bottom of Stockholm’s harbor in 1956. And in Denmark archaeologists seeking to excavate five Viking-era ships in Roskilde Fjord built a coffer dam—a watertight enclosure—around the ships, then drained the water to expose them.
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By the time the team at Yassı Ada completed their final field season in 1963, van Doorninck was able to draft a nail-by-nail, plank-by-plank elevation of a 60-ton seventh-century Byzantine cargo vessel. It was a ship whose design favored speed over cargo capacity and was well equipped with 11 anchors, an extensive set of tools, and sufficient nails and lead sheeting to allow the ship’s carpenter to make repairs at sea if necessary. Those aboard certainly dined well, too. The ship had an unusually fancy galley with a tiled roof and was kitted out for preparing and serving elaborate meals in style. “These facilities are, to my knowledge, without parallel among the excavated Mediterranean shipwrecks of antiquity or medieval times,” says van Doorninck. “The ship was able to provide food and drink and accommodation to a considerable number of people in a gracious manner at a time when passengers normally provisioned themselves and slept on the open deck.”
Subsequent research into the typology and provenance of amphorae and the knowledge gleaned from other shipwrecks excavated since then have allowed archaeologists to tease out a backstory that is far more interesting than anyone had anticipated. Close study of the coins, amphorae, and personal effects found in the wreck revealed the ship was likely owned by the Christian church, possibly the monastery of Samos a few days’ sail to the north. It had sunk in the summer of A.D. 626 while ferrying a cargo of wine and olive oil to beleaguered Byzantine troops campaigning in the east against the Persians in the final year of what historians call the last great war of antiquity. This uniquely human tragedy was among the first of countless long-lost stories that have since been plucked from the depths by archaeologists pursuing this novel field of underwater archaeology.
