Sun, Nov 13, 2016 page5

• FEATURE: Lost world of shipwrecks found preserved in Black Sea

  • NY Times News Service, New York
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  The medieval ship lay more than 800m down at the bottom of the Black Sea, its masts, timbers and planking undisturbed in the darkness for seven or eight centuries. Lack of oxygen in the icy depths had ruled out the usual riot of creatures that feast on sunken wood.

  This fall, a team of explorers lowered a robot on a long tether, lit up the wreck with bright lights and took thousands of high-resolution photos. A computer then merged the images into a detailed portrait.

  Archeologists date the discovery to the 13th or 14th century, opening a new window on forerunners of the 15th and 16th century sailing vessels that discovered the New World, including those of Columbus. This medieval ship probably served the Venetian empire, which had Black Sea outposts.

  Never before had this type of ship been found in such complete form. The breakthrough was the quarterdeck, from which the captain would have directed a crew of perhaps 20 sailors.

  “That’s never been seen archeologically,” said Rodrigo Pacheco-Ruiz, an expedition member at the Center for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton, in Britain. “We couldn’t believe our eyes.”

  Remarkably, the find is only one of more than 40 shipwrecks that the international team recently discovered off the Bulgarian coast in one of archeology’s greatest coups.

  In age, the vessels span a millennium, from the Byzantine to the Ottoman empires, from the ninth to the 19th centuries.

  Generally, the ships are in such good repair that the images reveal intact coils of rope, rudders and elaborately carved decorations.

  “They’re astonishingly preserved,” said Jon Adams, leader of the Black Sea project and founding director of the maritime archeology center at the University of Southampton.

  Kroum Batchvarov, a team member at the University of Connecticut who grew up in Bulgaria and has conducted other studies in its waters, said the recent discoveries “far surpassed my wildest expectations.”

  Independent experts said the annals of deepwater archeology hold few, if any, comparable sweeps of discovery in which shipwrecks have proved to be so plentiful, diverse and well-preserved.

  “It’s a great story,” said Shelley Wachsmann of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University. “We can expect some real contributions to our understanding of ancient trade routes.”

  Goods traded on the Black Sea include grains, furs, horses, oils, cloth, wine and people. The Tatars turned Christians into slaves who were shipped to places such as Cairo. For Europeans, the sea provided access to a northern branch of the Silk Road and imports of silk, satin, musk, perfumes, spices and jewels.

  Marco Polo reportedly visited the Black Sea, and Italian merchant colonies dotted its shores. The profits were so enormous that, in the 13th and 14th centuries, Venice and Genoa fought a series of wars for control of the trade routes, including those of the Black Sea.

  Brendan Foley, an archeologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, said the good condition of the shipwrecks implied that many objects inside their hulls might also be intact.

  “You might find books, parchment, written documents,” he said. “Who knows how much of this stuff was being transported?”

  Experts said the success in Bulgarian waters might inspire other nations that control portions of the Black Sea to join the archeological hunt. They are Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.

  Foley said the sea’s overall expanse undoubtedly held tens of thousands of lost ships.

  For ages, the Black Sea was a busy waterway that served the Balkans, the Eurasian steppes, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Greece. It long beckoned to archeologists because they knew its deep waters lacked oxygen, a rarity for large bodies of water.

  The great rivers of Eastern Europe — the Don, the Danube, the Dnieper — pour so much fresh water into the sea that a permanent layer forms over denser, salty water from the Mediterranean. As a result, oxygen from the atmosphere that mixes readily with fresh water never penetrate the inky depths.

  Batchvarov of the University of Connecticut said most of the discoveries date to the Ottoman era.

  So it was that, late one night, during his shift, he said assumed that a new wreck coming into view would be more of the same.

  “Then I saw a quarter rudder,” he said, referring to a kind of large steering oar on a ship’s side.

  It implied the wreck was much older. Then another appeared. Quickly, he had the expedition’s leader, Adams, awakened.

  “He came immediately,” Batchvarov said. “We looked at each other like two little boys in a candy shop.”
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