National Geographic: Lost Ships of the Mediterranean Page #4

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Let him try to get it vertical first!

Oh those beautiful cooking pots.

Ha Ha. Oh they're so glorious.

Okay, watch the guys.

Make sure the objects don't

come down on anything hard.

Thank god they're here!

I'll tell you, I was really happy

to see those cooking pots arrive.

The amphoras, we've got more of.

What would they cook in that?

What kind of meal.

That's the one you'd

do your one pot stew in.

It isn't as though you made

one thing here and one thing there.

Just throw it all in.

Refrigerator soup.

My wife's mother calls it.

Whatever is at the end of the week

in the refrigerator.

Well, this is in beautiful shape.

There's something special about

touching something

that has been untouched by humans

for almost 3000 years old,

I mean, to the time of Homer.

Wow. That's, that's pretty far back.

Here comes the pot,

so don't jump up, Dan.

Two years after

scrutinizing a fuzzy video,

Stager finally enjoys

a close encounter.

Few little sea creatures

attached to it.

Well, my great wish came true that

it was 8th Century

and not something Byzantine.

You know the other possibility

for it was that it could date,

oh, maybe 1100, 1200 years later.

In which case we have lots of wrecks

and lots of material from that period.

But you rarely if ever find this

on land complete.

Even if they're more or less complete

they've all been shattered

and you have to put them together

to make up the whole.

But out here, a whole shipload

of them intact.

It's marvelous.

Bathed in a solution

of fresh and salt water,

the artifacts are now the concern

of conservator Dennis Piechota,

his son James and assistant conservator

Catherine Giangrande.

Sampled and sifted for future analysis,

sediments might yield traces of a meal,

or fragments of the ship's hull.

I'm getting 7.2 millimeters.

Preservation of this pot

will take months,

but its digital doppelganger

is ready for study.

It's equally possible the amphoras

contained olive oil or wine.

I think I'm almost at the bottom...

Then Giangrande spots

the residue of tree resin,

used for sealing amphoras of wine.

It's as fine a discovery as any

to toast.

Not a bad millennium.

Terrific wine.

The superb condition of the amphoras

leads Ballard

to a theory about the fate

of the ship that carried them.

The ship is not busted up.

There's very few amphoras

that were broken.

So it wasn't like they were

tossed around and flipped around.

They were swamped.

You know, when you get in trouble

you tend to run with the sea,

hoping you can outrun the storm

and get away from it,

but you can then have

a very powerful wave come over

the stern and just swamp you.

We call 'em rogue waves.

I've been in two of them in my life.

We took one head on-

right over the bridge,

took off the ridge, took off

the mast, all but sank us.

So my first expedition,

I almost went down in a storm!

Understanding the wreck site

has also consumed the

computational energies of the team.

So we've got the map crunched.

Using data collected by a sensor

on Jason, Dana Yoerger

has produced a three-dimensional map.

It shows the wreck is sitting in an

oval depression nearly two meters deep,

and helps explain something

that's been puzzling Ballard.

'Cause you know one of the thing

we've been,

the problem is the amphoras

are full of mud.

And you figure out,

how could they be full of mud?

But what you've done is,

it was buried.

When the ship was swamped,

it probably sank to the bottom

like a weight, and buried

much of its hull in the soft mud.

In time, wood-boring organisms

ate away any exposed hull or mast.

The amphoras' unbaked clay stoppers

simply dissolved.

As wine escaped,

water and sediments poured in.

Over the centuries, deep-water currents

scoured the surrounding sea floor,

excavating the wreck,

and laying bare its amphoras.

So much revealed in so few days.

The team has earned a bit of fun.

Feet were still a little apart.

I don't know, about an 8,

something like that...

Ballard:
Time to get all the children

out of the water and get back to work.

Day 9.

The team heads for the coordinates

of the third sonar target.

Three two seven...

Three two seven

and a hundred ninety one meters.

The expedition leaders have been

keeping nearly 24-hour shifts.

But there's no sign of fatigue

when a target appears on Jason's sonar.

Down 75 on the range.

That's a 55-gallon drum.

That was a decoy.

They always drop drums

to throw people off their trail.

Let's, uh, go back to 400, just do

a simple turn and see what you've got.

As Jason rotates, he picks up

something far more promising.

It's trash

Straight ahead.

Okay. There it is!

It's amphoras! Yes!

All right!

It's the same.

The same!

It's a fleet!

It's another bunch of them.

It's the same guys.

They had a bad day.

Look at that.

That wine company went bankrupt.

It's exactly the same. 8th Century.

Same guy caught the same storm,

heading the same direction.

This one is more laid out,

more spread out.

More scattered.

Bonus!

Definitely!

A survey reveals a ship early similar

in size and shape to the first wreck,

facing west,

and carrying the same cargo.

But here, more small personal items

seem to be exposed.

Ah, Now, there's a bowl.

There's a dish or something.

These could help confirm

the homeport of the crew.

Zoom down, zoom.

Keep going. Focus stop.

Boy have we got some work to do!

For the next few days,

Jason's busy as a bee.

Oh, that's a beauty, a little cooking pot...

This is terrific.

I thought this thing was too big to be

a bowl and it's actually a moratorium

and it's for grinding different kinds

of spices and herbs

and putting it in the stew.

Great!

It's swinging. Don't go overboard.

Now we're getting slightly

different sizes.

Yeah, this one looks like about

a gallon more than that one.

I'm not an archeologist

and Larry's not an oceanographer,

but maybe our students can be

half archeology, half oceanography.

Are these the ones you want

or should we put them back

and get some different ones?

I think we like these!

You've got people

who wanna study shipwrecks

and people who wanna build stuff

to study shipwrecks coming together.

And of course the technologies

that are available

lend themselves beautifully to this.

Let me look at that. See this?

Looks like a candlestick holder.

Yeah, well,

you're looking at it upside down.

See, actually the way this

would stand, Bob, is like that.

This is most likely a little chalice

for burning incense,

incense to the protectors,

the protective deities of the sailors.

They may well have held it this way,

added their incense,

and others would be raising

their arms like this,

to Baal - Baal Hadad or Baal Zafon,

the Baal of the North.

Day 14.

Jason's final load yields a distinctly

Phoenician 'calling card'.

So that's the clincher.

We've been looking for something

really decisive - well that's it.

That cinches is for a Phoenician ship,

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