Every morning a school of big black fish who can’t swim very well plunge down into my front garden, making lots of noise and bubbles. They tear up all the plants, but instead of eating them they carry them away. Then they take little bright orange sponges and plant them all over the ground. But instead of letting them grow, they quickly become dissatisfied and pull them up again. They swish sand away from the little smooth rocks, touch them with yellow tendrils, and then cover them up again. Then they bring lots of burning and flashing lights down from the sky and
sw
im around very slowly holding strange white shells. Meanwhile, one of them goes round sticking its tentacles and sometimes even half its body into all
the little houses on the rock and pulling out all the furniture. This one is especially annoying and has a silly yellow thing on its head. I’d really like to bite this one’s tentacles off just to teach it a lesson. Wait… it’s coming closer… it can’t see me… now’s my chance… Aarrgh! The bright flashing light!!!! The other one sneaked up on me!!! Hmph, I think I’ll just stay back here in my house and look menacing… from a safe distance…
The moray eel that lives above our shipwreck has witnessed some very bizarre things during the past week, but then so have we. Two visiting survey teams and four SOA archaeologists have all come up with slightly different measurements for the Roman column drums. The photo-modelling results will be the decider, but our experience demonstrates the difficulty of obtaining precise measurements on these large eroded objects using the traditional tape-and-plumb-bob method. We do better with small objects such as the beautiful miniature olpe from the column wreck: a set of quick measurements and a digital photo are enough to produce a useful working drawing for our catalogue. Then there are the mystery items: the metal rods fused to the marble slabs (fasteners for the column drums?) and Tufan’s anchor shaft, more recently referred to as the ‘anchor’, the thing that’s ‘sort of like an anchor’, and now finally and definitively ‘the long metal thing that is clearly not an anchor’. We have finished our work on the Roman column wreck, but we are still a long way from understanding it.
As for the identity of the new Byzantine wreck - well, it seems to be the same ship as an 8th-9th century AD Byzantine wreck discovered in 1993 by an INA survey, and also the same ship that Tufan and Gokhan Bey ‘discovered’ while looking for the column wreck. We suspected this all along, but were confused by the depth reported for the 1993 wreck, which was much shallower than our site (and you will remember that all the wrecks along this cape were previously designated by a single set of coordinates). Now we understand that the cargo of this ship is so scattered that you can find bits of it at almost any depth. There are at least six amphora types represented in the site area, three of which come from earlier periods. Of the two in the photo with the scale, the back one has become an octopus home and is full of sherds and other debris. Our cursory search through the octopus holes did not yield any spectacular treasures, although it did turn up a broken tile that may be a remnant of the roof of a ship’s galley. No doubt this wreck has many more surprises in store for anyone with the time to search it thoroughly, but our time here is done. More ships await!The final dive of Guzden and Gokhan Bey confirmed the location of our next target: a 19th century Ottoman steam ship called ‘Inayet’ – yet another victim of the Aegean’s mysterious Bermuda Triangle…