The SOA Project

In May of the year 2000, Tufan Turanli, Director of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) headquarters in Turkey, received the approval of the INA Archaeological Committee to proceed with a project entitled "Shipwrecks of Anatolia". The following goals were set forth in that proposal:

The Shipwrecks of Anatolia project will continue until all the shipwrecks that INA knows about are fully documented -and as the other archaeological survey teams keep finding more, that could be a long, long time! However, the publication of our findings (on this web site) will be immediate and ongoing, from day-to-day updates of fieldwork to detailed multi-media site reports. To learn more about our field operations and the database project, click here...

Investigation without excavation

 Archaeological survey has come a long way from the days of tabulate/evaluate, and careful non-intrusive examination can often prove to be a worthwhile and cost-effective alternative to excavation. The potential value of taking a more comprehensive look at known underwater sites has already been demonstrated by students who have written theses on INA survey material. In her thesis on a Byzantine shipwreck at Iskandil Burnu, Manuela Lloyd writes, "the importance of this study, aside from the new closed deposit of pottery, lies in the conclusion that a shipwreck can be interpreted to a significant extent, by a complete survey and extensive research, prior to its excavation" [Lloyd (1984) iv -bibliography-].

 To put it another way: if the full excavation of a shipwreck is like a bright shaft of light illuminating a small piece of history, then the information gathered from survey is like a soft glow, that sometimes helps us see the bigger picture even while obscuring the details. The enormous number of shipwrecks now published allows deductions to be made about the history of seafaring on a macro level. The SOA database will be a significant addition to this pool of information, from which scholars may gain a more general appreciation for the state of seafaring in Anatolia, and the wider Mediterranean world.

Systematic documentation and monitoring of underwater sites is also important for identifying potential threats to their conservation, such as erosion or human activity, which might necessitate a rescue excavation. Records of a wreck’s condition and the technical level of the dive may also one day be useful for planning controlled underwater ‘heritage sites’ accessible to tourists. The value of an online version of the SOA database to researchers without access to the rare luxury of a nautical archaeology library also deserves mention. But the most important and immediate function of the SOA database will be as a research resource for INA, and in particular INA underwater survey operations. Instead of the current collection of bulky hand-written notebooks, survey teams in the field will have an entire multi-media library at their fingertips on CD-rom. The database will contain all the information and computer tools they need to plan, implement, and document a successful underwater survey.

How many amphoras make a wreck?

To date, INA Turkey has focused most of its attention on one type of underwater site, the shipwreck. The SOA database will cast a wider net, encompassing underwater features and structures (such as ports and dumps) as well as obvious shipwrecks. We will also try to document certain types of sites that previous survey teams usually passed over, such as heavily looted wrecks or isolated groups of finds that may or may not indicate a shipwreck. Moreover, despite INA Turkey’s primarily historical-archaeological focus, we are not going to limit ourselves to ancient shipwrecks ... you can expect to see 19th century steam ships and WWI submarines making their way into the SOA database as soon as we get round to them!

Conclusion

SOA is not an archaeological survey, nor will the SOA database take the place of published archaeological reports. Nevertheless, by producing a visual record of Turkey’s known underwater sites, summarizing previous research, and adding new observations, the SOA database will serve as an excellent resource for INA students and scholars – and, we believe, a project of great interest to anyone curious about underwater archaeology and the history of seafaring in general.

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