Jason and Medea: A Techno Love Story

In the late 1980s, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) named Jason (seen hovering over the Isis shipwreck above and being hoisted overboard off the coast of Ashkelon, Israel, in 1999, below), developed by Robert Ballard and a group of engineers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, allowed archaeologists to peer deep beneath the sea to find shipwrecks that were once far out of reach.

Jason allowed Ballard and Harvard archaeologist Lawrence Stager (shown above, at left, with project conservator Dennis Piechota) to explore two Phoenician ships (the Tanit and the Elissa) in 1,300 feet of water off the coast of Ashkelon, Israel. Jason’s cameras took hundreds of photos of the wreck sites, which were then “stitched” together to form an overall picture of the site. Ballard also retrieved objects selected by Stager with Jason’s padded grippers.