This month’s Archaeology Magazine features an article about the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project. Led by Dr. Elizabeth Greene, Brock students participated in the underwater excavation of this late antique shipwreck as part of the Archaeological Practicum in Mediterranean Lands.
“Nearly 1,500 years ago, a Byzantine merchant ship swung perilously close to the Sicilian coastline, its heavy stone cargo doing little to help keep it on course. The ship’s crewmen were probably still clinging to the hope that they could reach a safe harbor such as Syracuse, 25 miles to the north, when a wave lifted the vessel’s 100-foot hull and dashed it on a reef, sending as much as 150 tons of stone to the seafloor. The doomed ship was carrying a large assemblage of prefabricated church decorations—columns, capitals, bases, and even an ornate ambo, or pulpit. These stone pieces lay on the seafloor for 14 centuries until a fisherman spotted some in 1959 while hunting for cuttlefish.”
Read more here: https://www.archaeology.org/issues/309-1809/features/6856-sicily-byzantine-shipwreck.
MA student Esther Knegt sketches two columns beneath a large boulder. In the background, Classics graduate Alex Moore ’18 excavates around another column.
