Why is this one of the most important archelogical discoveries?
:’) Dunno who said it was, but anyway, known Phoenician shipwrecks are ridiculously rare, despite the fact that the estimates for the number of Phoenician ships over the period of some few centuries of their heyday is fairly large. They were A) very good at plying the seas, and B) probably salvaged when they went down in fairly shallow water.
Those two things are true of ancient wrecks in general.
Robert Ballard, while looking for some modern submarine about ten years ago, found a couple of Phoenician wrecks in very deep waters off Israel. Like sailors today, ancient captains took the shortest routes, which could mean most favorable winds (sail west to east during part of the year, east to west another part of the year), but more generally meant as straight as possible to the destination. Coast-hugging was no more common then than it is now.
also, here’s this, Ballard’s find of 8th century BC ships off Ashkelon:
Iron Age Shipwrecks in Deep Water off Ashkelon, Israel
Robert D. Ballard and Lawrence E. Stager
Daniel Master, Dana Yoerger, David Mindell, Louis L. Whitcomb, Hanumant Singh, and Dennis Piechota
http://web.mit.edu/deeparch/www/publications/papers/BallardEtAl2002.pdf