Inside BAR

It wasn’t exactly your typical day at the beach: Ami Eshel, a member of Kibbutz Ma’agan Micha’el, located along Israel’s Mediterranean coast about 20 miles south of Haifa, spotted a pile of rocks while swimming in shallow water. On closer inspection he noticed pieces of wood and some pottery sherds. Had he stumbled upon the remains of a ship? Eshel alerted the Israel Antiquities Authority, whose marine experts soon confirmed his hunch: The remains were indeed part of an ancient shipwreck. The ship’s remains, thanks to having been mostly buried under a huge pile of rocks (which had served as its ballast) and under sand, proved to be remarkably well-preserved. A team was soon assembled to unearth the wreck—an often dicey proposition that had to contend with surges of water and the threat of quick deterioration of the remains once they were exposed to the air. In “Excavating an Ancient Merchantman,” Elisha Linder, head of the rescue team and a founding father of marine archaeology in Israel, describes the drama of the salvage operation and explains how the Ma’agan Micha’el ship, 2,400 years old and possibly of Phoenician origin, fills what had been a void in our understanding of ancient seafaring.