Monday morning, 11 July 2005
Hello from the research vessel AEGEAO Since the last update, we've hit some new marks.
By Thursday night we had collected four complete data sets over the 4th century B.C.
wreck off Chios, including photomosaic images and multibeam sonar bathymetric data.
Hanu Singh is cranking out beautiful two-dimensional photomosaics of the wreck from
different perspectives, Chris Roman is working on the sonar maps, and Ryan Eustice is
crunching data to make a three-dimensional surface plot using the photographs.
With that cat comfortably in the bag, it was time to go after pure gravy.
Discussions with our Greek colleagues resulted in a plan to search for and survey an early
19th century A.D. shipwreck from the war between Greece and Turkey. The HCMR
sonar and remotely operated vehicle teams found the warship, but the remains were so
scant it wasn't worth putting SeaBED in the water. There were just a few encrusted
cannon sticking up from the mud, with cannonballs and debris scattered over a wide area.
After spending Saturday on that site, we made a transit to the western side of Chios. The
Greek archaeologists had a report of a late Roman wreck (about 400 A.D.) at a depth of
36 meters (110 feet) near the shore. When we got to the site the HCMR ROV team
dunked their vehicle to look for the wreck. They found it after a couple of hours of
searching, tucked up very close to the shore on a wickedly steep rocky slope. The
archaeological diving team went in the water and recovered a single amphora from the
site. It looks like the site is much older than first thought, probably dating to the first or
second century B.C.
Our team planned a SeaBED mission to run along the depth contours and away from the
underwater cliff. The AUV again was flawless, running a two hour mission and
collecting 2000 images of the site and surrounding sea floor. While the vehicle surveyed
the shipwreck, the Greek science divers shot video footage of the AUV. We'll certainly
post some of the video on our web page when we get back to WHOI; seeing the vehicle
serenely cruise over the early Roman wreck is ... well, it's just cool.
Our point in this shallow survey was to showcase the potential of underwater vehicles for
easing diver-based archaeology. Most diving time on archaeological sites is consumed
with basic mapping tasks. Typically it takes hundreds of diving hours to make a site plan
using tape measures and clipboards. Our robotic vehicles can map and photomosaic a site
with quantifiable accuracy in the space of a few hours.
By combining our technology and methods with standard archaeological diving practices,
we can free the divers to do the things they do best. That includes excavating; but even
more importantly, thinking. Archaeologists should spend their time analyzing and
interpreting the site instead of being mired in boring repetitive tasks.
Today our team has a much-deserved day off while the HCMR scientists hold seminars
with undergraduates from the Greek oceanographic university. Tonight we'll be back at
our work, deploying Dr. Rich Camilli's mass spectrometer on a shipwreck. We hope to
detect the chemical signatures of materials on the 4th century B.C. wreck with Rich's
chemical sniffer. No one has ever done this sort of thing before, so we're all curious to
see the results.
From a relaxed and happy ship,
The Chios 2005 Team
Representing:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Franklin W. Olin College
University of Southampton
Plymouth State University
in collaboration with
Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities,
Hellenic Ministry of Culture
and
Hellenic Center for Marine Research