"The Antikythera Shipwreck: Excavating the World's Richest Ancient Shipwreck"

good afternoon and welcome on the behalf of Michael Taylor the director of the museum and the staff of the hood Museum of Art welcome to this this today's lecture I am Kathy Hart senior curator of collections and the Barbara C and Harvey P 19 or Harvey P hood 1918 curator of academic programming here at the museum it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the hood Museum of Art for this lecture by dr. Brendan Foley which is being presented in conjunction with the exhibition put sidon in the C myth cult in daily life which opens to the public tomorrow but we have a treat for you tonight we are pleased to tell you that after the lecture you were invited up to the galleries to preview the exhibition the galleries will remain open till 7:00 p.m. this exhibition was organized by the Tampa Museum of Art in his presentation at the hood has been generously supported by Clair Forster and Daniel S Bernstein class of 1987 and the Elinor Smith fund the Evelyn AJ Hall fund and the Marie Louise and Samuel our Rosenthal fund we also have here this evening one of the lenders to the exhibition dr. Wally Gilbert and we thank him for generously agreeing to part with his objects for the run of the show over three venues today's lecture has been co-sponsored by the Neukom Institute the Dartmouth archaeology working group and the hood Museum of Art I would like to thank our colleagues in particular dan Rockmore and deb nichols for their support of this program and to the members of the art history and classics departments for their advice about our programming in conjunction with this exhibition please also join us on January 30th and 31st for the official celebration of the exhibition and a half day symposium we also have a number of gallery talks that are being given by members of the faculty and staff and please check our listings either in our quarterly calendar or online for those those gallery talks dr. Seth Panik who is curator of this exhibition and will give the keynote address on January 30th is currently the acting director chief curator and richard e perry curator of greek and roman art at the tampa museum of art we are very pleased that he's here this evening and in fact he's been here all week helping install the exhibition and would like to take this opportunity to thank him for organizing this marvelous looked into the image myth and cult of poseidon and sharing it with the dartmouth and Upper Valley communities with this showing at Dartmouth it is especially meaningful to us as he's a Dartmouth graduate class of 1999 and a former intern of the hood Museum of Art thank you also to dr. Foley for making the journey here on this cold January day to share with us his important archaeological work on the Antikythera shipwreck so Seth will introduce dr. Foley's as the Dartmouth graduated it is indeed very special for me to come back here tonight and and to see this exhibition that has already been at a couple other venues here at this place which will always be a special place for me but my job tonight is to introduce our speaker dr. Brendan Foley who has a very long and distinguished CV he asked me to keep the introduction short and I'm sure the the images and the talk that he's going to give us will be more interesting than what I have to say but I can tell you he is a native New Englander who grew up in Massachusetts and earned his bachelor's degree at the University of New Hampshire so it is a cold night but that's not unusual for Brandon I suppose he also holds master's degrees from Tufts University and the University of Southampton and a PhD in the history and archaeology of Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for many years now Brendan has been working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and also on a number of very very interesting underwater excavations in Greece and tonight's lecture will tell us a lot more about one of the most famous of these his work on the the Antikythera shipwreck in Greece some of you may have heard about this shipwreck which was initially excavated more than a century ago and yielded some of the most spectacular and and really interesting objects that you can see in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and Brendon has been working on this recently and has has even gained attention in the popular media so you may have heard about him via the Smithsonian or the BBC or the New York Times he's been very much in the news and and I look forward to hearing his lecture tonight so please join me in welcoming Brendan Foley good afternoon Thank You Kathy Thank You Seth it's a it's a delight to be here back in New Hampshire I feel like I'm a little bit of culture shock because I live in Sweden nowadays so being back here in the in New England in America is well feels like a homecoming so I'm delighted to be here and and thanks for coming out tonight I thought you do is spend about 40 minutes talking about the Antikythera shipwreck and some of the technology we've been using to to bring to bear for archaeology underwater I sit in the deep submergence laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic who we as we call it the deep submergence laboratory and the National deep submergence facility at Woods Hole run the deep submergence vehicle systems for the world scientists we can operate at any water depth down to the the challenger deep in the Marianas Trench at a little bit more than 10,000 meters we have robotic systems we have human occupied vehicles we have a whole suite of very advanced sensors and what we do is extract information from the oceans now I'm the only archeologist that's ever been employed at Woods Hole Oceanographic even though we have a long and storied past past of investigations of shipwrecks for instance Bob Ballard who founded the deep submergence lab discovered Titanic back in the 1980s he went on to look at Bismarck and a whole bunch of lost American and Soviet naval assets sitting on the deep sea floor which doesn't get a whole lot of press a lot of that work is still sort of sort of black but the technologies that were developed originally during the Cold War and that we're then transferred over to scientific users are now available for the social sciences and humanities for archaeology what this means is that the entire seafloor and everything on it is now accessible to us and the mediterranean sea floor in particular is a vast repository of human history the biggest library the biggest museum gallery in the whole world and with these technologies we have the key we'll be the first ones in its that sense every day of Carter opening Tut's tomb the seafloor is full of amazing things even things that we cannot imagine so I'll show you a little bit one of the technologies we've used most recently is depicted here in the lower left it's called the exosuit it's a semi robotic system a person gets in it and it can go down to a thousand feet and stay all day and come back up and the person inside pays no decompression penalty the way that a normal scuba diver would so an interesting piece of kit it's actually owned by a construction company in Massachusetts and its original job was to work on the aqueducts of New York City and the sewer outfalls in Boston but it's been it's been now loaned to us to use in Greece and we're learning to crawl with it learning to walk with it we hope and in the coming years we think that this is going to be a way to get archaeologists down on the Antikythera shipwreck to start but then many other shipwrecks down to a thousand meters and put trained eyes on the archaeology without having to worry about the safety of the human so a bigger picture instead of just one shipwreck civilization Mar that the modern world starts here in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age the end of the Stone Age about 3000 BC and that big blue expanse there that you see isn't a barrier to communication between the early cultures the early civilizations like the Egyptians they're on the Nile Delta like the the people up and it was actually the biggest freest highway that you can imagine in the ancient past before there were roads before there are armies and police forces maintaining order before there were airliners certain certainly the fastest safest most efficient way to move anything certainly bulk goods luxury items people and ideas was by sea across that across that big blue expanse so sailing was relatively safe but not perfectly safe so some fractional percentage of all sailing voyages in the ancient past and even today end in wrecking events it's how ships die so if you were poseidon sitting on the the abyssal plain of the mediterranean over the millenia there'd be this constant traffic overhead swarms of traffic mostly seasonal pulsing and every once in a while Poseidon will reach up with his Trident pokus ship and these raindrops fall down onto the sea floor these raindrops or shipwrecks what they really are our packets of information you can think of a shipping voyage as an ancient telephone call the remains the physical remains of those ancient telephone calls are the artifacts from the shipwreck and our technology now allows us to eavesdrop on those ancient conversations so if we want to understand the origins of civilization one way to do it is to look at the shipwrecks that sit on the deep Mediterranean Sea floor now with the technologies we have we can begin to think about surveying the entire sea floor of the Mediterranean you know about the Malaysian airliner that went down recently and before that the Air France flight out of Brazil Air France 447 Air France 447 went down in the middle of the Atlantic in an underwater mountain range about 5,000 meters deep over 15,000 feet deep a group from Woods Hole and others went down and using our autonomous robots we surveyed the area until we found the wreckage ground truth our sonar data with video imagery and led the recede the recovery team to get the black boxes the effort that it took to do that can now be applied to archeology and with that same sort of performance metric that we had an Air France 447 in one month we could survey 1% of the aegean sea floor and find every shipwreck on it now that doesn't sound like a whole lot 1% in a month but if you think about the the areas of the Mediterranean the Aegean that are likely to hold shipwrecks and you will eliminate the area that's been trial fished you eliminate the area that's been buried by sediment coming in from rivers or ash from the fearin eruption in the Bronze Age you're down to maybe 25 or 30 percent of the sea floor that's archaeologically interesting so what we're saying is that a two-year or three-year continuous effort will allow us to map every archaeological interesting bit of seafloor in the Aegean why is that interesting the shipwrecks represent a different kind of data different kind of resource than we would find on land archaeology sites things are preserved on the ancient sea floor that typically don't get preserved on land sites so the most photogenic example are the bronze statues which populate the National Archaeological Museum in Athens all of these came from sites underwater most of the great bronzes that we have from the classical and Hellenistic world were recovered from shipwreck so recovered from sites underwater so that's one example of the kind of thing the kind of information the kind of artifact that gets preserved underwater that you don't see on land sites but there are many many others and one of them is ancient DNA ancient DNA from the trade goods that were being carried on these ships we can now extract aged DNA from the transport jars on these shipwrecks and get hard data about what was being manufactured and traded in the first complex economies so this is why we go into the deep sea floor and by by my estimations there's there should be a shipwreck about every three square nautical miles on the sea floor out there in the mid they're not all created equally some shipwrecks are more important than others and there's no better example of a really important fabulous shipwreck than the one that's off the island of Antikythera the wreck dates to about 60 BC and it was discovered in 1900 by some sponge fishermen from the island to see me they had sailed along the north coast of creeks to pick up one of sponge fishermen and as they were turning the corner to go into the Mediterranean to sail over to Tunisia the winds came up and they had to put into Antikythera island for a few days so here you see their Chi Ikki and it's a very blurry image it's a glass plate negative image of course but you can maybe make out a man standing in the middle with the the the brass diving helmet the bronze helmet so just by chance they dropped over the side to see if there were any sponges down below and the diver pulled on his on his communication line emergency pulled me up right away so the men on the deck hauled him back up and he came up got the helmet off and started shouting and ranting about landing on a pile of rotting corpses naked women and horses down below so the captain of the vessel took his turn in the diving suit wanted to go down and see what this is all about here you see captain cantos with his family and when he came up from his short dive he was holding a bronze arm and hand and it weren't they were not corpses they were bronze statues that they had landed on and just by chance more than a hundred years ago these sponge divers discovered landed upon the richest ancient shipwreck that's ever been ever been found so what else was aboard this ship the the sponge fishermen continued their voyage on down to Tunisia they fished for the season and then when they came back to the Aegean they reported their fine to the authorities in Athens now they were from simi which was still under the control of the Ottoman Turks the Ottoman Empire but they were fiercely proud of their of their hellenic traditions they were there were Greeks through and through so reporting back to Athens that they had found Greek antiquities on the seafloor the Greek government then got quite excited they detailed Greek Navy ships to go down and help them and they paid the men to salvage the the antiquities off the wreck so what did they find well they found many many things this is a huge shipwreck they brought up amperes which are sort of the 55-gallon drum of antiquity these are the the standard shipping container for anything liquid or some my liquid carried all sorts of foodstuffs often they're associated with wine although our ancient DNA work is showing that the vast majority of contents of these jars was not wine at all so first century BC jars from from all over the eastern Mediterranean world and the Adriatic also these small perfume jars unguent area which would have contained unguent mints medicines possibly cosmetics and perfumes these are rarely found on shipwrecks and an indication that this is a high-value cargo with in it with an elite elite market in mind and these beautiful glass bowls mosaic bowls produced again in the eastern Mediterranean and what's now Syria and Lebanon the one in the upper left the mosaic Bowl we had known about these we've seen them from tombs and other archaeological sites but all of those were at least a hundred or even 200 years later so the discovery of this mosaic bowl on the Antikythera shipwreck pushes the known origins of the manufacture of this type of artwork back by at least a century there were coins all sorts of coins from from Asia Minor from the cities along the what is now Turkey the biggest hoard of coins from Asia Minor ever found outside of Asia Minor and jewelry many associated with with women so these earrings and the gemstones many of them came from the same area of the shipwreck some of these were recovered in 1900 1901 but some were also recovered by Jacques Cousteau in 1976 who is the last person who was allowed by the Greek government to dive on the shipwreck before us but the most amazing thing that came off the shipwreck was the so-called Antikythera mechanism and this has been billed as the world's first computer it's not really a computer because it wasn't programmable and the way that modern computers are what it was was a collection of maybe 70 gears differential gears all put together in a way so that if you turned one main drive handle it rotated these gears and on the faces on the front and back of this mechanism indicator needles would spin it showed the positions of the five known planets it showed the phases of the Moon on one face on the backside two interlocking spirals predicted forward and backward in time the likelihood of lunar and solar eclipses there were other dials on it that predicted that showed the the timing of four of the major ceremonial games the olympic games than the mian games and two others and if that weren't amazing enough it's also the first known object with an owner's manual so in script about two millimeters high in greek script there's these inscriptions that tell you how to operate the machine and and what the needles will will indicate a fabulous thing and anachronistic by at least fifteen centuries there's nothing as complex as this again until the Clockwork mechanisms of medieval Europe a fabulous thing here's one representation of what it may have looked like an exploded view the the great thing about the mechanism is it's so complex that it could not have been a one-off no genius no lone genius could have sat down at his workbench and made this thing out of bronze bronze plates with hand-cut gears in one go it has to be somewhere on a continuum of technological development it's the only example we've ever found it's the only sight that we know that's ever produced anything like this and the sight has never been scientifically investigated so that's where that's where we come in with the new technologies and the ability to go down and very precisely map this site and excavate it other things that came off the shipwreck for marble horses life-sized marble horses almost certainly they were associated with with a chariot which could have had a statue of a warrior in it or possibly even Athena Pro Marcus the thing of the warrior so here's the crew on that Greek Navy ship in 1901 and you can see in the sling there they've just recovered one of these one of these horses they recovered all four three of them are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens right now the fourth one however just as it got up to the surface the rigging slipped and the horse plunged back down into the depths they said it was bottomless but we know it couldn't have been any deeper than about 150 160 meters because we've thoroughly mapped the entire coast of the island now so we're hoping in coming seasons we might be able to relocate this fourth horse and reunite him with the rest of his team statues 36 marble statues here's a wrestler the right side of him is still shiny and perfectly preserved because he was embedded in the sediments his left side was up in the water column and the limestone of the marble has been badly eroded by the action of the see most of the marbles that came off this site are badly eroded because they were mostly proud of the sediments standing up into the water column on the left Odysseus now we've we know what these statues represent because there are Roman copies that are extent but the statues that came off the anti-ship Antikythera shipwreck are all either Hellenistic or classical they date from the 1st century BC right back to the 4th century BC and even in they're badly eroded state I think that there's somehow even more evocative than they may have been in their original beautiful form and this striding figure speaks to me I think it's more human than than even it would have been coming out of the sculptors workshop in 1953 one of my personal heroes Doc Edgerton the famous electrical engineering professor from MIT joined Jacques Cousteau on Calypso and they went to Antikythera for about a day and a half they relocated the site because Cousteau wanted to go and see if there are more antiquities when they got back to Athens they toured through the outside courtyard holding space at the Museum and these are many of the statues from the antique it through a shipwreck the best ones are now inside being exhibited in the gallery actually many of them are on their way to Basel for an exhibition but even now several of these statues are still housed outside now under a roof but still in an outdoor courtyard we were able to see them this past year human remains there are at least four individuals represented by skeletal remains and teeth coming from this shipwreck there may be more represented than that very very rare to find human remains on ancient shipwrecks in fact this is the only wreck that I'm familiar with that has so many human remains this skull has been interpreted as the skull of a woman and it was recovered in 76 by the Cousteau team and it came about it came from a location two meters away from where those fabulous gold Cupid studded jewel-studded earrings were found along with some of the other unguent area and things associated with females and this leads to the the speculation which we have no proof of that perhaps it was some elite woman sailing with her dowry off to be married in Rome we can't prove it but it's a nice romantic story and then the bronzes so the ofey the antique it threw a youth greater than life-size stands over six feet tall and now on exhibit in the National National Archaeological Museum it could be Paris holding the Apple of strife which ultimately launched the Trojan War it could be Perseus holding the head of the Gorgon Medusa we don't know but one of the most most impressive most fabulous statues from the ancient world still extent the head of the philosopher he wasn't anywhere near as intact as the youth but we have his arm we have his hand part of his tunic and this this beautiful rugged face but that's not it we have these hints we have these suggestions that there's far more down there waiting under the sediments we start counting up the feet and the hands and the arms and the accoutrements from other statues and there are six or eight other life-size bronze statues almost certainly still waiting in the sediments for recovery these are interesting these these fragmentary pieces of the bronzes it was it was suggested in the 1960s by an American archaeologist Peter Throckmorton that may be the sponge fishermen weren't so proud of their Greek heritage maybe they didn't report everything to the Greek authorities maybe they recovered some of these bronze statues and instead of going down to Tunisia to sponge fish they dashed across the Alexandria and sold these life-size bronzes into the open market but none of them have ever come up and it's been more than a hundred years you would think that statues like this would have changed hands so we don't know we don't know for sure if the sponge fishermen did pill for anything what Throckmorton had said was well there's no other metal that's come up from the wreck for instance we would think that a big ship like this would have had many many lead anchors and of course the sponge fisherman always used needed lead to to weight themselves down onto the sea floor so the fact that we haven't found any lead anchors leads me to believe that the sponge fishermen took those lead anchors and maybe some other things so we had this in the back of our minds throckmorton's words when we went back to the shipwreck so keep that in mind here's the arm and hand of a boxer and of course there's the the fabulous statue of the boxer that's usually on display in rome which i think is right now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is it possible that we could find a boxer down there to to complement the one that's now in the Met and of course swords there are at least two swords and there's the crest from from a warrior's headdress that have been recovered so again that warrior or possibly Athena still resting on the on the the sea floor so what do we do this past season we went back and our first goal scientifically must have must do is make a very very precise map of the seafloor so the way we went about that was to to bring a robot an autonomous underwater vehicle an unmanned system made by one of my colleagues Oscar Pizarro here he and I went through MIT together he now works down in Sydney in Australia the robot carries a stereo pair camera and with Oscars engineering skill it employs an algorithm called simultaneous localization and mapping slam so it takes pictures as it mows the lawn over the wreck site in a very precise pattern and it pieces all those images together into a three-dimensional photo mosaic and map of the site that's hyper precise each pixel and the resulting map is four millimeters in real space so what that means is over the entire wreck site we can place any artifact that we recover and we can really understand the orientation of the wreck site and the artifacts within it so here you see the robot busily over the wreck site running its survey pattern there are no artifacts that we've seen the sponge divers did such a good job in 1901 they really did us a favor they took all the big bulky stuff like those statues got them out of our way so what's left is the natural rocks of the seafloor and a relatively flat sedimented blanket which sits on an uplifted seismic Terrace the depth here is close to 200 feet deep it's over 50 meters 50 to 55 meters you saw the vessel that the the robot was launched from that was generously provided to yacht provided by one of our Greek sponsors panels Oscar Eden so the I cattorini las heridas foundation contributed that vessel for us it was really quite generous of him he he when he's not using the the ship himself he charters it for somewhere between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand euro per week and he gave it to us for the month at one point during the survey the robot went over the edge of this uplifted Terrace a very steep vertical drop and it's of course trying to maintain an altitude of constant altitude so it went over this edge down into deeper water and as it turned around and tried to come back up it got hooked on a piece of ghost fishing line so that's what you're looking at here I got a call I was on shore this day been and the robots trapped can we rig a technical diver ego doubt and saver so we started getting tanks filled with the proper mixed breathing gas to go down and save it but the Australian team had brought a small robot and they were able to deploy that and that's what you're seeing here with its little manipulator and they were able to unhook it from the line and save the day and there was much rejoicing there's the vessel Glaros I put the Australian team as a three-man team of engineers and I put them in cabins on the yacht there's a lovely Filipino crew that kept coming up and say mr. Oscar mr. Oscar mr. Stefan would you like a coffee would you like a glass of wine the engineering technician Christian Lee's is a terrific guy he settled into the yacht living lifestyle I didn't think we're gonna be able to get him off the ship it's really funny the most important thing for us the absolutely critical thing was to map the wreck site at least as we understood it so that's how we dedicated our first days of the survey we had pretty nice weather those first days as you saw there the weather started coming up the car got pretty stormy what you're looking at here is the the end result the data product this is the map you're zooming out now it's a 70 by 30 meter area that we surveyed to that that hyper precision that meant that we could put it on the big screen in the yacht salon and all look at it together and analyze it with the divers with the archaeologists with the engineers the technicians everyone had a much better understanding of the site because we don't have much time at 200 feet depth to mess about so having this sort of map allows us to plan our strategy very very well we took what we knew from the Cousteau expedition in 1976 where the artifacts were recovered we started placing them on our map we printed our map out well sighs we were able to take a memory stick and put it on another sponsors helicopter and zip it off of our remote island and get it up to Athens and have it printed out on this the stick plastic material and then the next day back on the ferry back to Antikythera so within about 24 hours we had this stuff printed up in on our wall I'm not sure we would have been able to do that if we were in downtown Manhattan and somehow we were able to do it in one of the most remote places I've ever worked I mentioned that the weather wasn't so good I'll show you a little bit about that in a second but first we'll have a closer look at this map and the power of it you can see the scale here that shifts as we zoom in and out and on the far right hand side of the screen you've got a depth scale which will come into focus right here so you can eliminate the the photos if you want and get down to the underlying bethe symmetry you can even see the texture of the rocks so if archaeology is absolutely concerned with the spatial relationships between artifacts then I feel pretty confident that this sort of mapping capability allows us to do actual science we can we could have repeatable results and we can do this successively as we get into excavation we could have a virtual excavation in the computer where we can go back and forth and time refill our trenches virtually with the with the computer data and this was all done in about four days of survey with the robot and a couple more days of data processing time after that so the weather started getting rough to coin a phrase we knew that the storm was going to come in we had the historical records and we've worked on the cylon two years before so we knew that it was going to get rough it's really difficult to determine from these kind of imagery how big the waves are unless you've got something to give you a sense of scale so give you a sense of scale this is a person the winds blew hurricane-force day day after day it was so loud that was keeping us up at night because it was whistling through all the nooks and crannies on rocks and in the buildings on shore and had to get through we had scheduled something like 28 days to be on site on the island we ended up with five dive Obul days so what do we do in those five days we made the most of it but the kind of team that we had which included Phil short was one of the world's most extreme divers he was featured in an article in The New Yorker last year for his work cave diving in a huge complex in Mexico Alexandre sotirios one of the premier divers comes from an elite diving family in Greece I knew we only needed one good day with the mapping we had located an anchor stock a lead anchor stock and here's Phil recovering that now from the depth of 52 meters so that notion that Peter Throckmorton had that the sponge divers had taken the lead anchor stocks off the wreck proved untrue so we recovered one there we actually had recovered another lead anchor stock just a few hundred feet away in 2012 this is a good day the ship balancing like that metal detectors on site for the first time so we could pinpoint our efforts under water when the sponge divers were here in 1990 no one there their doctors lasted about eight minutes of which two minutes was on the bottom maybe three when Cousteau was there there their bottom time was about ten minutes because they had scuba technology without closed circuit rebreathers we had an hour and a half on the bottom we were able to really spend some time looking at the site those two artifacts you just saw recovered are elements of an ornate bed other pieces of it had been recovered in 1901 in 1976 and here's the ultimate it's a 2 point 1 meter long almost 7-foot tall bronze sphere it's a statue element and it was under the sediments we hand found after a metal detection hit and this came right up it was at the very southern extremity of our map so the wreck as we understood it when we got out to the site actually wasn't positioned as we thought so instead of us surveying with a main cargo hold of the wreck we were shifted somewhat toward the stern for the passenger compartments possible so it's pretty clear that if we go back when we go back this year we need to shift our effort remap a much greater area to the south of where we recover these artifacts as we got metal detection hits all over the seafloor this is my colleague Theotokos Theo Toulouse the co p i works for the effort of underwater antiquities the Ministry of Culture and sport and as one of the nicest human beings on this planet it's just a terrific guy this is Alexandra so T are you there on the lower right and that's Phil short our chief diver diving operations manager that bronze ring that you see it's one of the rigging elements of the ship itself so running rigging would have been run through that that loop so not only do we have statue elements we've got parts of the ship itself including those anchors and of course the the ornate bed components which we think probably came from a passenger compartment in the stern of the ship we recovered this other anchor collar and stock in 2012 and here's how it works here it's basically a gravity anchor so uh about a 200 kilogram about a 450 pound chunk of lead in that stock and another 75 or 80 pounds of lead in the collar this is about the standard size we've seen these on other shipwrecks about 1.4 meters long four foot long a little bit more than four feet long for the stock and and the call or 80 centimeter so what's that about 2 feet 10 inches long and here's the depiction of that so try to remember those measurements I just gave you here's a 3d representation and this this is courtesy of Autodesk reality captures the software Autodesk provided a whole suite of their software to us at no cost to help us document the artifacts and the wreck itself and speaking of sponsors you might have noticed throughout the name Hublot and possibly the very large dive watches that that were on the team Hublot is a luxury Swiss watchmaker that supported the sponsor the the exhibit of the Antikythera shipwreck at the National Archaeological Museum and they were kind enough to jump in and sponsor our program too and the helicopter came in one day and we met the director of research and development Mattias bootay on the back deck of Glaros and he had this big bag with him and as the divers came in off their their dive for the day he presented each of our dive team with a $30,000 Hublot watch to keep so so I try to take credit for that hey guys there's your bonus for the project we had a lot of happy divers there they're a large piece of titanium and decorated to 4,000 meters so someone said you can go to 4,000 meters once once so they back to the story of these these lead anchors on the last dive of the last day Phil and Alexandros and our two videographers photographers underwater team swam down to the southern extremity of the site where we knew that there were more artifacts concentrated in alexander's who's got a great eye saw just a little bit of lead under all sorts of concretion so he took his dive knife and started scraping away and he scraped away what he thought at first was another anchor stock but it turned out to be an anchor collar and this anchor collar is more than a meter long so more than 20% larger than the one we had recovered before and in fact is the largest I've ever heard of so if the collar is a meter long the stock must have been massive and this starts to feed into some other information we have about this wreck what was the ship itself like by the end of the project we were up to five lead anchors all over the site so this notion the Throckmorton had that these have been pilfered by the divers is completely incorrect it's just that no one's had the time and the technology to locate them before so it feeds into our notion of these other bronze statues being down on the sea floor but the lead is significant important because we can do isotopic analysis and try to determine the geographical location of the mines that produce the lid we don't know what that's going to tell us yet and ground tackle anchors can be picked up in any port so it doesn't necessarily mean that the ship came from the same place as the source of the lead however this ship was sheathed in lead the hull under the waterline sort of an analogue to bottom paint but very thin a few millimeters thick lead sheathing coated the hull of this and there's bits of this hull sheathing LED all over the seafloor and we collected a couple of pieces of that now in 1976 the Calypso team the Cousteau divers had excavated a bit dredged really they hadn't done it so Tsai typically but we'll forgive them it was 1976 and they uncovered four articulated hull planks still joined together and they brought these up and they were conserved and then they were sent off to the effort of underwater antiquities storeroom for artifacts out on the Ionian coast at pilos one of my colleagues in the effort at yoga scutes of La Keys remembered this and he went out to pee those and he brought the planks back and I was sitting talking with him at the effort over over the spring last year and he said curious thing about these planks the nailing pattern for the hull sheathing indicates that the hull sheathing was put on at the time of first construction and that's significant because it means that if we can identify the source of that lead it probably will mean that we can determine where the ship came from he said but there's something else that's even more interesting than that these planks are huge they're massive they're more than 10 centimetres thick they're four inches thick now that's about the the thickness of the hull planks on USS Constitution down in Boston so massively massively constructed all of this starts to add up and you think what kind of ship would have been carrying a cargo that's so spectacular these fabulous statues what kind of ship would have had the cargo capacity and what sort of what sort of merchant or or important person will kind of ship with that person have Charter to bring the stuff back to Rome if that's where it was going and the one that pops up to mind is the ancient grain carriers now we have written sources that refer to two of these the siracusa and the isis and these were not cargo ships like we think of cargo ships today they really are more like Titanic they really are more like the luxury liner of the time they were the mechanism they were the machine that allowed Rome to have the first population greater than a million people they were sailing these ships from Rome down Alexandria or into the Black Sea and bringing back massive cargoes more than a thousand tons of grain to provide the bread that went with the circuses so in these writtens horses they talk about these ships having mosaic floors having a library having passenger compartments that were that were exquisite with these incredibly ornate beds like the components that we've seen they had fish tanks on board these huge freshwater fish tanks too to keep their their food ready-to-eat stables for 21 horses on these these ships and the passengers you might have 200 or 300 passengers on board these ships so massive something like a hundred and seventy feet long there weren't ships this size again until the medieval period or even later it's possible that what we're looking at here at Antikythera is the remains of an ancient grain ship now again you think about a cargo like statues these beautiful bronzes these marbles in their in their poses you have a high bulk low weight very fragile cargo how do you pack that in modern day we build a crate for it and fill it with bubble wrap or a styrofoam or something you couldn't do that in the ancient world maybe you'd have a crate but then you'd still need to have a whole lot of weight to balance the ship properly so some of the historians and archaeologists have suggested that maybe these statues were packed in sand and that's what kept them from shifting around too much what if he packed him in grain then you'd have a paying dunnage so we've taken sediment samples from five different points around the wreck and we hope that we'll we'll find ancient grain samples seeds in that sediment and prove prove that maybe this is how it moved well this other southern end of the site we found lead pipes which are certainly associated with water removal system so either scupper pipes or part of the bilge pipe bilge pump mechanism and again isotopic analysis and this is the kind of thing that would have been installed at the time of regional construction so it gives us more data points here's that bronze ring a 3d representation of it from the running rigging and I'm not sure yet now this is new to me I don't know what we can do with with the bronzes but I've contacted University College London and a laboratory in Switzerland and we're going to throw everything we can all the resources we can and extract every single bit and byte of scientific information from every artifact we recover from the shipwreck the wreck is so important it deserves our full attention and am for us of course we did recover a few amperes from the wreck site this is a lambo Lea - which is has been associated with southern Italy but now it looks like possibly they were produced in and what is Croatia so here we are with our our trophy on the transom that's Ed O'Brien the diving safety officer from Woods Hole sitting next to me there and again we can use the the new technique that we've developed to extract even from an empty amphora trace ancient DNA and determine what the contents were a laga knows a table jug this is the 49th laga nose that's come off of this ship again that speaks to a contingent of elite passengers these typically weren't used to transport goods they were too fragile they broke too easily this would have been to carry stuff that was consumed on board probably not by the crew who would have been a bunch of Roughnecks I suppose but by the passengers so ancient DNA analysis will conduct on this too and try to figure out what was contained in it and there's plenty more down there this one was upside down in the sediments very close to where the spear was recovered and then again on the southern extremity of the site tears of amphoras which looked to me like they're still in their lading positions and these are very very close to bilge pipe in the lead anchor so it looks very much like the ship hit the cliff hit the island and started to break up if it's one if it's one massive ship it could also be two ships that were sailing in consort they have the same both of these locations which are separated by about two football fields carry the exact same types of ceramics so we think it's either one ship or or to vessel sailing and consort you know I love to set things up so that it's a win-win if it's one massive ship if it's a grain carrier then archaeologically that's huge if it's two ships sailing in consort that went down together then we have instant compa Ronda and that's that's a win also so it's it's an exciting place to work and here's the beautiful and talented dr. maria hansen who happens to be my wife who's our molecular biologist and she'll do the ancient DNA analysis and we're based in inland she's a professor of molecular biology actually environmental toxicology the the archaeological stuff is just a lark she does on the side and then one more video the greek government in a nice echo of 1900 put in resources you see here the helicopter of one of our other sponsors back elias Constanta carlos from costa Navarino he provided his executive helicopter for us which is pretty heady stuff actually and hugely hugely important because Antikythera is so remote so we're able to fly in our scientific team fly them in and out get our VIPs get the media there and it really worked well we had a component failure on the robot we were able to order a new part and have it helicoptered in so we only had one down day instead of instead of being out of the water forever I mentioned the Greek government and that nice echo they provided Hellenic Navy support so you see the ship Thetis here arriving it's a little bit of an elderly ship but it worked for our purposes and they even detailed the tugboat to help position the vessel what we wanted to do was three point more there's the tug the ship Thetis right over the wreck site because the exosuit that technology required a support ship of this size to deploy safely so what the weather is nasty as it was the ship had to hole up in the Peloponnese for more than a week for about 10 days and the chief of naval operations of the hellenic navy was kind enough to keep extending for us the window of opportunity to to get the ship down there until finally finally we just waited for the weather to break Poseidon was not so kind to even though we made an offering and finally we got the ship at least close to the wreck site now we never expected that the exosuit was going to allow us to excavate perfectly in the first times the first time I had ever been in the ocean first had ever been deployed off a ship so it was baby steps we wanted to practice the evolution of launching recovery get a Greek into the exosuit a Greek Navy diver is Glaros plowing through the seas some of our media arriving with Panos we actually put panels Laska PT's who's what 72 years old into the exosuit and let him do a quick dive which was excellent for his ego and for public relations and also proves the point that almost anyone can with a little bit of training and get in there so the first deployment of exosuit ears IDI from what's whole deploying we put the suit down beyond 200 feet just to test it out and the owner of XO sue who would come out and we treated with a great deal of kindness offered us the suit for the next five years at no cost so now we'll really be able to develop the capability just getting down to the very last couple of slides to show you a little bit of the exosuit evolution for all the political problems in Greece I have to say that there's nowhere in the world I'd rather work as a reason I work in Greece the Greek Navy was unbelievably supported they provided their combat swimmers there our Navy SEALs as our diving support team which is a pretty good feeling to know that someone that capable is watching your back they saw the watch we put another watch on exosuit it looks so futuristic it looks like something that Robert Downey jr. was wearing a Hollywood movie looks like Iron Man when you get into it feels like your Lancelot in a suit of armor from the medieval period but we think it's going to be a real asset for us in the future it has thrusters that you control with your with your feet so you're sort of straddling a bicycle seat resting your feet lightly on these gimballed foot pads and that allows you to thrust forward and backward twist left twist right go up down you can maneuver some yeah those are Washington got to keep we'd have to keep the sponsors happy it's very generous of them to support us we couldn't do it without the sponsors so it's more like spacewalking than diving I'll leave you with a closing thought the Antikythera shipwreck is spectacular but by the most conservative estimates if you just start thinking about what might be out there what has to be out there on the deep sea floor easily three-quarters of a million shipwrecks from the ancient ancient period from antiquity we've discovered far less than 1% so what else is out there that's the thought that wakes me up at night and gets me out of bed every morning we've got this vast playground and I get to be and the team that I am fortunate enough to work with we get to be the pioneers we're the first ones out there to see but we hope that the next generation that come along that comes along is inspired by what we've done we hope that the galleries will be full of things that fill us all with joy and that there'll be many many other archaeologists and engineers and mathematicians and computer scientists and everything else coming along behind us to explore the deep sea floor and rediscover the origins of civilization so thank you for your attention if there's any questions I'm happy to there's one someone to break the ice what kind of disabilities were you seeing and when you were underwater they're about 200 feet Wow yeah you in in the images of the exosuit you can read the whole numbers off the ship even though the exosuits down about 150 160 feet it's it's stunning I actually measured the visibility the first time we went to add to Catherine June 2012 I brought a second disc and from the surface lowering it down we had 32 meters of visibility and horizontally when you're at depth it's even greater what will be the eventual home of the antiquities that you recover well that's it that's a good question it'll it'll be certainly a Museum in Greece and there's always a little bit of jockeying among the different divisions of the Ministry of Culture the right place for them to be in my mind is probably in the National Archaeological Museum but there's there's a movement underway right now to create a museum specifically geared toward maritime archaeology so that could be another good home for it and I'm really hoping that with the the interest in the Antikythera mechanism and the Antikythera shipwreck exhibit that's now traveling from Athens to Basel and then eventually on to Washington DC and elsewhere that if we make theirs discoveries that we anticipate there'll be a traveling exhibition I can tell you one place they probably won't end up ever and the British Museum this technology is fabulous is there anything else out there that you know about that you're wanting to get to use for this well the Navy wants US Navy once lent us a nuclear submarine and and that was pretty good I'd like to get that back but the NL ones been retired and I'm not sure they're going to give me the Jimmy Carter but it would be nice on these projects obviously this is uh this is archaeology as big science it stands to reason you know I sit at the oceanographic institution and all the other scientific fields command project budgets that are well into the millions of dollars you know our research vessel nor our new vessel the Neil Armstrong charters for about fifty thousand dollars per day so ocean science is big science and it's it's it's got big budgets I don't see any reason why good archaeological science also shouldn't command the same kinds of budgets so on all of these projects I say to the team okay guys think big tell me how you think we ought to do this and don't let cost be an object give me what you would do in your grandest vision and one of the things that came back from the technical divers was we ought to consider doing saturation diving having a habitat installed at a certain depth on Antikythera underwater and then instead of worrying about an hour hour and a half of bottom time and two hours of decompression for every dive instead we could put divers into the habitat with the habitat on the seafloor and they could work eight-hour days so I don't know what the price tag would be for that probably something around four million dollars but it's something to consider it would be lovely to have it would really increase our efficiency although I'm not sure how you graph out efficiency per dollar cost I have been laughed at at some conferences before when people say it's so expensive and I say it doesn't matter how much it costs it only matters that you can raise it the money I mean not the artifacts if it's worth doing it's worth doing is there any indication that the ship may have been anchored there since you found the anchor spotted around rather than you know driven ashore by a storm or bad navigation I'd say it's absolutely impossible that it was anchored we had Thetis make seven attempts to try to anchor over the wreck site and that's that's a ship with a diesel engine and a tugboat and we couldn't anchor the ship at all there so in my mind there's no doubt that it it piled up I think at night in in a terrific Gale why do I think at night well the fact that there are human remains on the ship to me means that they were below decks and and didn't see the didn't seen the wrecking event coming so I think that's the most likely scenario do you know the sights of any famous naval battles ancient naval battles are they known there's a there's a site that's being investigated right now from the Second Punic War off the Agati Islands near near Sicily and a colleague of mine Jeff royal from rpm nautical has been working with Sebastian ou-tulsa who's the archaeological superintendent day of Sicily and they've been mapping out the battlefield from this this tremendous you know epic battle between the Carthaginians and the Romans and what they're finding is the bronze Rams from these warships both Carthaginian and Roman and I don't know what the count is now they've got more than a dozen of these bronze Rams and it's really it's it's a it's a battlefield landscape that they're that they're mapping out it's it's fabulous I I saw Jeff last week at the AAA conference in New Orleans and and I was just chortling I was like oh my god your work is so exciting it was like this mutual admiration society between us I want to come on your project now I want to come on your project so that's that's the one ancient battlefield site underwater that that's having a lot of attention paid to it now there are others is Lepanto and i spoke with another archeologist about possibly doing some survey there and seeing what my they might lie on the seafloor out there I have a question Brendon so when you're doing archeology on land you have trenches and you're measuring everything out and you know where you are at any given time when your divers go down do they know exactly where they're landing and if they find something how do you end up mapping exactly where you found it a bunch of different ways we typically will print out on mylar the site plan and and just like land archaeology will will denote grid square where we want them to work where we want us to work but with the with the mapping with the precise mapping we really know where everything is we know where where everybody is and because the robots are really really good at repetitive tasks I mean it's what they're made for it's not what humans are made for so one of my gripes about archaeology has always been we spend so much of our time and effort you know we've got these trained people with these supercomputers in their skulls and what are they doing they're holding a tape measure and writing down numbers it's mind-numbing ly boring and that's that's how we survey sites in shallow water typically with the robots we can just eliminate that so we send our divers send our team to a specific grid square we excavate there just like you would do on land and then we run the robot over again and and and map everything we can do it so quickly especially if you're over just a small one by one meter grid square you don't even need the robot you can just take your stereo pair camera and snap pictures every every few minutes as you're as you're excavating so in a lot of ways archaeology underwater is somewhat easier and in a lot of other ways it's a lot harder so you know it's win some lose some do you have a way to integrate the metal detection device with the location so you can actually get readings of you know the the pings that you're getting with the metal detection yeah and then do you have any sense of like where that's distributed in the wreck and that there are things down there besides the I know I know you believe that there are things down there besides the anchors but do you have a lot of evidence that hey this is a really good place to look next time that's exactly the next step so I've been talking with Oscar and stuff and you know at the end of the project we were all so enthused and so excited we're like let's get back out there as quick as we can because Hublot had already said that they are in some of my private sponsors here in the United States foundations and individuals had already committed to funding for the field season so Oscar and Steph we were talking about two different sensing modalities it would be new one was sub-bottom profiling sonar so we could actually get a fairly good picture down through the sediments into the bedrock and the second was precision metal detection so we started looking around for what kind of sensors would be available off the shelf so that we could bolt these things on as quickly as we could integrate the sensors into our to our data stream for the vehicles and we found we found a system and we think that we can modify it so that will get amplitude and then we'll have that that really good map and we can integrate that into the nav stream that we've got so we should be able to overlay that metal detection map with the amplitudes so we get the hot spots we're hoping but then Oscar and Steph emailed me last week and they're like yeah about May that's coming real quick how about July well if we have to we have to yeah we're not we're not turning a spade of sediment down there until we've got those kinds of maps so the nice thing about a ship that's been down there for over 2,000 years is it can wait it can wait another six months

Channel: Dartmouth

Views: 40,712

Keywords: Dartmouth, Hood Museum of Art, Antikythera Shipwreck, Brendan Foley, Woods Hole, Neukom Institute, Dartmouth Archaeology Working Group

Id: owVfI4p0zgs

Length: 65min 42sec (3942 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 03 2015