This morning the SOA team set out to investigate the ‘column wreck,’ a first century BC
stone-carrier with a cargo of massive (130 cm diameter) fluted column drums and giant (180 x
100 x 20) marble slabs. In a word, BIG. There was only one slight problem ... we couldn’t
find it.Today’s experience offers an opportunity to reflect upon how far the technology of nautical archaeology has come since the pioneering work of George Bass and others in the 1960s. As late as 1993, when the column wreck was first discovered, hand-held GPS units were still the toys of a wealthy few. In the official 1993 INA survey report, this wreck and the two other stone-carriers along our cape were designated by a single set of coordinates. Now, using a GPS unit costing only a few hundred dollars, we have mapped the precise location of each of the shipwrecks we have worked on, as well as their relation to the contours of the shoreline. Once
we process the information from our 3-D mapping, we will be able to pinpoint any wreck site
around our cape to within an amphora. The excitement of wasting a whole morning searching for
a shipwreck at 45m in strong current will soon be a thing of the past. But at least there was
a consolation prize: Tufan and Ministry of Culture representative Gokhan Bey came across a
previously undiscovered Byzantine amphora carrier during their search, yet another victim of
our ‘Bermuda Triangle’. The rest of the morning was devoted to the photo-modeling of the 7th
century ship, a task we had previously ruled out as impossible due to the terrain, but which we
accomplished today with the aid of multiple reference grids (in the form of ceramic bathroom
tiles). This was followed by a highly productive siesta.
Let us briefly consider the siesta, an essential part of any repetitive decompression diving
schedule. During this peaceful time, some sketch, some sunbathe, some snorkel, some repair
equipment, and some people get locked in the recompression chamber while a bunch of complete
amateurs fiddle with the pressure dials to try and figure out how they work. This is all good
training for an emergency, of course, although the squeaky high-pitched screams of the
pressurized ‘volunteers’ can be annoying if you’re trying to sleep. 
to wonder at the ingenuity and craftsmanship of the people
and ships that handled these huge unwieldy stone cargoes in the pre-industrial era. And yet
the need to transport such goods by sea must have been great, for it compelled Greco-Roman
shipbuilders to create ships of a size and sophistication unequalled until modern times.
Although the average speed of an ancient merchant vessel was as little as 3 knots, and the
sailing season brief (March to November at the outside) it has been calculated that in the time
of the Roman Emperor Diocletian it was still cheaper to ship grain the length of the
Mediterranean than to carry it less than 100 miles using land transport. Ancient writers talk
about the risk of shipwreck as a fact of life as mundane as a traffic accident, but it did not
stop them from using the sea at every opportunity. Indeed, the existence of large cities in
the ancient Mediterranean world (Rome, Alexandria, Ephesus, Constantinople) - with all their
attendant cultural achievements - is unthinkable without the existence of water-borne trade on
a massive scale.
In such a seafaring world, the loss of a few dozen ships on a dangerous cape over the centuries
was hardly enough to create a ripple in history. Now, however, they have something to tell us
about history ... or at least present us with some intriguing questions. Why are the majority
of the shipwrecks in this area from the Late Antique or Byzantine period, when the economic
heyday of this region was during the Early Roman Empire? Were all of these ships the victims
of winter storms, when waves of up to 7 meters crashed against our cape? And if so, what
compelled them to attempt voyages at that time? Where did these huge stone carriers come from,
where were they going, and why? No doubt we will be considering these and many other questions