Our third day working on the church
wreck. There is no doubt about it, this site is addictive -especially when you toss in the nitrogen cocktail we experience diving 38-40m. Every dive reveals something exciting and different: a new amphora type, a curiously carved piece of marble facing, a deeper level to the rows of stacked columns. Our photo mosaic highlights features unseen on the sea floor: a column base, a graven circlet of stone, hints of more facing slabs in the outlying sand. A lot of the "shapes" simply don't make sense architecturally, and (as you can see from the photos) the heavily concreted and eroded marble often defies attempts to obtain meaningful measurements. We can do our best to record the scattered pieces of this jigsaw puzzle, but it would require a full excavation to piece them all together. Hopefully one day it will happen...Of special interest are the amphoras. This 5th - 7th century AD shipwreck belongs to a time for which we have several close parallels, notably the Yassi Ada 7th century shipwreck excavated by George Bass and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. At some point during this period, a revolution took place in the design of liquid cargo containers (which were predominantly amphoras until the 13th century AD). Greek and Roman amphoras were fairly haphazard in their capacity and design, but during Late Antiquity they became standardized to a high degree of precision - taking into account, for example, the different specific gravity of red and white wine. At the same time, Anatolia experienced a succession of Persian and Arab invasions that forced the beleaguered Byzantine emperors to rely heavily on the church to supply their armies. Ecclesiastical institutions were great producers of wine and other commodities in Late Antiquity, and the church even had its own fleet. The types of amphoras we are seeing on the church wreck may be associated with this trade. In fact, it is not out of the question that our ship's captain or owner was also a priest! If you would like to learn more about this topic, Dr. Nergis Gunsenin of Istanbul university is currently excavating a very interesting 13th century Byzantine shipwreck in the Sea of Marmara; you can visit her website at www.nautarch.org. Finds from Yassi Ada, including a beautiful reconstruction of the ship, are on display in the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.
