One July afternoon in 2015, the maritime archaeologist George Koutsouflakis was talking with a colleague in his Athens office when his phone rang. The caller was a free diver and spear-fisher from the remote Fourni archipelago, a small cluster of islands between Samos and Ikaria in the eastern Aegean.
During years of diving and fishing in the coastal waters around Fourni, the man had spotted dozens of areas where the seafloor was strewn with ancient clay vessels—the coral-encrusted cargoes from ships lost at sea long ago. Over the past year he’d made a hand-drawn map and marked the locations of nearly 40 possible shipwrecks. He wanted to show Koutsouflakis the sites.
The timing of the call was perfect: as a native Ikarian, Koutsouflakis had heard rumors of shipwrecks at Fourni for years, and that summer he’d been trying to organize an expedition to locate them. But funding was still precarious. While Koutsouflakis listened to the spear-fisher describe everything he’d seen, he flashed his colleague a grin. He knew that the project would happen.
In just 11 days of diving in September 2015, Koutsouflakis and his co-director Peter Campbell of RPM Nautical discovered 22 shipwrecks. This June they returned to the Fourni archipelago with a team of 25 divers, archaeologists, and artifact conservators. Over 22 days of diving they found an additional 23 pre-modern shipwrecks, raising the total number identified at Fourni so far to 45, an astonishing 20 percent of all known shipwrecks in Greek waters.
The sunken ships discovered in June 2016 span more than 2,000 years of Greek maritime history. The earliest shipwreck dates to roughly 525 B.C., while the most recent is from the early 1800s. The other wrecks range across the centuries, with cargoes from the Classical period (480-323 B.C.), the Hellenistic period (323-31 B.C.), the Late Roman period (300-600 A.D.), and the Medieval period (500-1500 A.D.) Cooking pots, plates, bowls, storage jars, a palm-size lamp, and black-painted ceramic fine-ware are among the artifacts recovered from the wrecks so far.
The most common artifacts that survive are clay storage jars known as amphorae. It’s possible to identify the place of origin for different amphorae by analyzing the style of the jars and the elements in the clay. The amphorae recovered in 2016 originated in Cyprus, Egypt, Samos, Patmos, Asia Minor, mainland Greece, Rome, Spain, and even North Africa, revealing the vast web of trade and commerce that crisscrossed the many cultures of the Mediterranean throughout history.
The larger impact of the project could transform the island into the premier destination for underwater archaeology in the Mediterranean. “We really don’t want to be one of those projects where a bunch of foreigners come in, find some artifacts, and then ship them back to Athens,” said Peter Campbell. “We hope to support the people so they can fund and maintain a world-class maritime museum right here on the island.”
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Source: National Geographic News
