Base camp supplies are replenished, almost everyone survived party night, and the SOA team is ready for action once more. Our first task: clean the Byzantine wreck. Imagine your garden is about the size of four tennis courts, and that you have neglected to weed it for the past 1400 years. Now you and four friends have less than 25 minutes to get the whole place picture-perfect using only your bare hands. Go! (p.s. and watch out for the giant scorpion fish that Orkan saw down there, somewhere, can't exactly remember...)Not surprisingly, our neat plan of dividing the scattered shipwreck into 5m grid squares for systematic cleaning and recording quickly fell apart
when confronted with the scale of the task. Every time we try to define the site, it seems like somebody keeps adding a bit on the end. New sand pockets filled with amphoras appear constantly. We find two iron anchors, and then another, and then two more. We discover small fine ware jugs and a bowl - but do they belong to the 7th century wreck, or an earlier 2nd century AD wreck that seems to be indicated by some of the amphora types? Neon-bright artifact ribbons now dot the sea cliffs like a field of poppies. We find a large stone anchor stock that could be between one and two millennia older than the Byzantine amphoras surrounding it. How many shipwrecks are we dealing with here? What started out as the least visually impressive of the shipwrecks is quickly becoming the most exciting site to work on, and even the mundane task of weeding has taken on the feeling of an Easter egg hunt. We are still debating how we can best do justice to this large and confusing site in the limited time available.
The SOA team has had several occasions to consider the topic of wine in recent days, and while working on an amphora carrier it seems appropriate to continue on that theme. Sometimes we may seem to take it for granted that all our amphoras carried wine, but at present we actually have no way of knowing their contents, since the amount of sea-life growing on them prevents us from seeing if they were lined with resin (usually taken to indicate that they once contained wine). Certainly the nearby islands of Chios and Samos, and the peninsula of Knidos to the south, were well known wine producing regions in Antiquity. We also know that wine (along with olive oil and fish sauce) was one of the most common bulk liquid trade goods. Which brings us to the most important question of all: do any of these amphoras still hold their original contents?
Well, we would love to find (and taste!) some ancient wine, but unfortunately the chances of finding it under the sea are not good. Because there is always a small air space between the wine and the stopper of the amphora (which was usually made of cork, wood, or terracotta, and sealed with wax or some other substance), the increase in pressure at depth causes the stopper to pop inwards and spill the amphora's contents to the fishes. There is, happily, a trade-off for the archaeologist. Octopuses subsequently often make these empty amphoras their homes, which they may 'decorate' with small items from the shipwreck. When a shipwreck is excavated, it is not uncommon to pull out an ancient oil lamp or other tiny treasure from a sunken amphora! In fact there is presently a little octopus living near our camp who has gathered many small pieces of stray INA equipment and artifact tags into his hole. Now, if only we could train him to take measurements and use the digital camera, we might have a chance of finishing this wreck...