Diving into History
Jack Linthicum
archaeological sites worth the visit. Clicking on the text at the
citation will yield a short article about each site.
Diving into History
Volume 62 Number 4, July/August 2009
The Latest Underwater Discoveries
In recent years, for-profit underwater salvors have captured the
public imagination, garnering breathless headlines announcing their
recovery of "treasure" ships. But there's much more to the world of
nautical exploration than the giddy promise of gold coins. Every field
season, underwater archaeologists make extraordinary discoveries that
expand our vision of humanity's past.
On the following pages, we highlight just a few of these ongoing
underwater archaeology projects, from the recovery of a sixth-century
B.C. Phoenician shipwreck, where excavators found a cargo that
included elephant tusks and amber, to work on a 19th-century vessel in
Oklahoma's Red River that has given archaeologists their first look at
early steamship design.
image
Roman Stone Carrier
Kızılburun, Turkey image
HMS Ontario
Lake Ontario, New York image
Min of the Desert
The Red Sea, Egypt image
Heroine
Swink, Oklahoma image
Corinthian Shipwrecks
Adriatic Sea, Albania
image
Submerged DNA
Chios, Greece image
The Khan's Lost Fleet
Bach Dang River, Vietnam image
Tristán de Luna's Ships
Pensacola Bay, Florida image
Phoenician Wreck
Cartagena, Spain image
Liman Tepe Harbor
Bay of Izmir, Turkey
In deciding which projects to feature, we canvassed several underwater
archaeologists, and relied, in particular, on James Delgado, president
of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and a valued member of our
editorial advisory board. For every story we selected, Delgado told us
about 10 other equally fascinating underwater excavations. To delve
even more deeply into the word of underwater history check out the
University of Rhode Island's online Museum of Underwater Archaeology
and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology's website.