Archaeology Odyssey

See Cemal Pulak, “Shipwreck! Recovering 3,000-Year-Old Cargo,” AO 02:04.

John P. Oleson’s study of this material indicates that it comes from North Africa as well as Italy; see Robert D. Ballard, Anna Marguerite McCann et al., “The discovery of ancient history in the deep sea using advanced deep submergence technology,” Deep-Sea Research I, vol. 47, no. 9 (2000), pp. 1612–1614.

For more on the Sestius family and Koan wine, see Elizabeth Lyding Will, “The Roman Amphora: Learning from Storage Jars,” AO 03:01.

Petrological analysis of two of these wine amphoras by David F. Williams of the University of Southampton identified the clay with an amphora kiln in Albinia, near the port of Cosa, the earliest Roman port known so far.

How long ancient coins stayed in use is a matter of debate, but those least in value, like this copper coin, would probably not linger for long. This date matches nicely with the typological dates of the pottery vessels from the wreck, the lamp, and the four late-Roman iron anchors found on the deck of the Isis.

A Late Bronze Age ship (c. 1200 B.C.) that foundered at Cape Gelidonya was excavated in the 1960s. See George F. Bass, Cape Gelidonya: A Bronze Age Shipwreck (American Philosophical Society, 1967).

The Mediterranean’s total area amounts to 1,145,000 square miles.

See the following articles: Cemal Pulak, “Shipwreck! Recovering 3,000-Year-Old Cargo,” AO 02:04 and Dorit Symington, “Recovered! The World’s Oldest Book,” AO 02:04.

Urartian’s only known relative is Hurrian, spoken by peoples who entered northern Mesopotamia around the end of the fourth millennium B.C. The central Hurrian city of Urkesh (Tel Mozan, Syria) was identified about ten years ago by UCLA archaeologist Giorgio Buccellati. In the mid-second millennium B.C., Hurrian peoples formed the powerful kingdom of Mittani in northern Syria.

However, this was not so among such Greek scholars as Spyridon Marinatos (1901–1974), the excavator of ancient Thera (modern Santorini), which was buried in a volcanic eruption around 1638 B.C. Marinatos argued that Delphi’s active geological history made it difficult to know what changes might have occurred over the past two millennia. He also made a report on an anemotrypa (wind hole) in the modern town of Delphi—a small cleft in the rock that emitted gas with a sulfurous smell. Scholars outside Greece ignored these ideas.