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15,000 wrecks lie buried on Irish seabed Andrew Bushe LUSITANIA, the Cunard Line steamer sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Cork in 1915 drowning all 1,200 on board, is one of the most famous shipwrecks in Irish waters. But a new study has discovered that the seas surrounding Ireland are littered with evidence of thousands of other maritime tragedies, with as many as 15,000 wrecks resting on the seabed. Following one of the most extensive research programmes ever carried out by underwater archeologists, the number of wrecks discovered has soared from an initial examination six years ago...

Researchers at the University of York and the British Museum have discovered traces of opiates preserved inside a distinctive vessel dating back to the Late Bronze Age. Vessels of this type, known as 'base-ring juglets', have long been thought to have links with opium use because when inverted they resemble the seed head of the opium poppy; they are known to have been widely traded in the eastern Mediterranean ca. 1650 - 1350BC. Researchers used a range of analytical techniques to study a particular juglet housed in the British Museum, which is a sealed vessel, allowing the contents inside to...

For those who think financial fraud or circulating fake currencies is a modern day phenomenon, an ancient Roman coin mould on display at the Department of Archaeology, Museums and Heritage in the city is a startling revelation. The Roman coin mould, which is being displayed for the first time since its excavation in 1993, indicates that fake coins were in circulation around 19 to 20 centuries ago. The terracotta mould is among the most important objects displayed at the exhibition, apart from terracotta figurines, iron objects, bronze dies, stone beads. M S Krishnamurthy, a retired professor of Archaeology who led...

PATTANAM, India -- Pottery shards, beads, Roman copper coins, and ancient wine bottles litter the strata beneath this small seaside village in India's southern Kerala state. The 250 families, mostly agricultural laborers, who live in Pattanam, 260 kilometers (161 miles) north of Kerala's capital Thiruvananthapuram, find the objects pretty, but would rather dig up the ground and build larger homes. But according to archaeologists K.P. Shajan and V. Selvakumar, they may be destroying the remnants of Muziris, a well-documented trading port where Rome and India met almost 3,000 years ago. They say that, based on remote sensing data, a river...

Sunken treasure with a distinctly fishy flavor has been recovered from a huge Roman shipwreck in the Mediterranean. The 2,000-year-old vessel, discovered off the Spanish coast, was described by marine archaeologists last week as "a jewel of the Old World." Jars found in Roman shipwreck photo However, it wasn't gold or silver that the ship was carrying but hundreds of jars of a foul-smelling fish sauce. The ancient delicacy, known as garum, was usually made from fermented fish guts and blood. Wealthy Romans, experts say, couldn't get enough of the stuff. The sailing ship, dating from the first century A.D....

Istrian archaeologists have excavated an ancient wooden boat dating back two thousand years from under the Poroc waterfront. The archaeological finding, the biggest in the last 30 years, is significant because the boat is well preserved and has many elements that are very rarely seen... The ancient wooden boat was found at the very end of the Poroc waterfront at the Porta de mar site, at the intersection of the waterfront with Cardo Maximus street near the former Kompas building. This is the third such boat found on the mainland in Istria and the first in Poroc. The other two...

A set of ancient copper ingots shaped as discs have been found in a shipwreck near a Black Sea cape in Southeast Bulgaria shedding light on the maritime trade of the Ancient Thracians during the Late Bronze Age (second half of the 2nd millennium BC) as they are analogous to copper ingots found in two famous ancient shipwrecks on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, at Gelidonya and Uluburun. The disc-like Late Bronze Age copper ingots in question have been discovered inside a Late Bronze Age shipwreck near Bulgaria's Maslen Nos, i.e. "Oily Cape", alongside other artifacts. Their discovery has been...

A Native American man in Montana has what may be the oldest DNA native to the Americas, according to news reports. After getting his DNA tested, Darrell "Dusty" Crawford learned that his ancestors were already in the Americas about 17,000 years ago, according to the Great Falls Tribune, a Montana newspaper.

Monkeys appear in Grecian frescoes dating back to the Bronze Age 3,600 years ago, but monkeys aren't native to Greece or the Aegean isles. But it's clear that the artists actually saw these monkeys in Grecian frescoes, or at least talked to someone who did in great detail, because the depictions are so accurate that researchers can identify the monkeys, according to a new study. Vervet monkeys appear in a fresco from Akrotiri, Thera. They're known for their rounded muzzles, a white band on the forehead, an extended tail and elongated limbs -- all accurately shown in the fresco. Baboons...

Dr. Mike Brennan: Unfortunately, on the E/V Nautilus expeditions, we have seen that many of the wrecks in the Aegean and Black Seas are heavily damaged by trawling activity. For example, one shipwreck, Eregli E, is the most trawled shipwreck in the Black Sea based upon scatter and damage to the artifacts and surrounding seabed. When we found it last year we saw that it was really damaged. The site had been so disturbed, it uncovered materials from beneath the sediment, including human bones. The bones had been preserved in the mud, but then had been ripped out by trawls...

A ship from the 8th century discovered off Dor Beach in the Mediterranean is thought to be the only vessel from that era ever found in the region. "We do not have any other historical or archaeological evidence of the economic activity and commerce of this period at Dor," said Ya'acov Kahanov from the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies and the Department Of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa. "The shipwreck will serve as a source of information about the social and economic activities in this area." The wreck [image] was found almost a decade ago but only...

They were found 1,000 feet down in June by a team made up of Harvard archaeologists led by Lawrence Stager, Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel, and a crew from the Connecticut-based Institute for Exploration, headed by oceanographer Robert Ballard. The ships are the oldest ever found in the deep sea and may change the understanding of ancient Mediterranean commerce. Because many shallow-water wrecks have been found, historians and archaeologists believed that ancient sailors preferred routes that hugged the coastline. Modern technology, however, is opening a new field of deep-water archaeology, which is showing that ancient sailors did indeed...

Five major ancient shipwrecks that carried amphorae and an anchor pole pointing to a large sea vessel are among the amazing finds found by archaeologists during underwater searches at the bottom of Levitha, a small island in the Aegean Sea, between Amorgos and Leros... The shipwreck at Knidos had a trove including amphorae, dating back to the same period, while three more shipwrecks with cargoes of Cone or pseudo-Cone amphorae were found (2nd and 1st centuries BC) and the 2nd century AD), a shipwreck with amphorae cargo from the North Aegean of the 1st century BC, a shipwreck with cargo...

Egypt's Oldest Known Art Identified, Is 15,000 Years Old Dan Morrison in Cairo, Egypt for National Geographic News July 11, 2007 Rock face drawings and etchings recently rediscovered in southern Egypt are similar in age and style to the iconic Stone Age cave paintings in Lascaux, France, and Altamira, Spain, archaeologists say. "It is not at all an exaggeration to call it 'Lascaux on the Nile,'" said expedition leader Dirk Huyge, curator of the Egyptian Collection at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium. "The style is riveting," added Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo,...

Deep-sea robot photographs ancient Greek shipwreck Deborah Halber, News Office Correspondent February 2, 2006Image © / Chios 2005 Shipwreck Survey -- WHOI, Hellenic Ministry of Culture: Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, Hellenic Center for Marine ResearchThis image shows a sample of the data collected by the SeaBed autonomous underwater vehicle as it swam over the Chios shipwreck in July 2005. The 3-D color mesh represents a topographic map of the sea floor, created using data collected by multibeam sonar. The brown strip shows the area captured in digital images, which were used to create the photomosaic of the wreck. Sometime in...

The pottery finds include items the Italian researchers think could be from Yemen... "The Yemeni pottery is very interesting because it was suspected that there were contacts across the Red Sea - and this proves that there were," Baines says. The naval artefacts included two curved cedar planks which might have been parts of steering oars... It is not clear exactly why the artefacts were sealed up inside the caves. But it is possible that they were offerings to the Egyptian gods. "That sounds very plausible to me, not least because previous excavations found a structure made of stone anchors...

Unquestionably the most exciting object from the wreck is the bronze bearded head (Fig. 1). From black glaze bowls and lamps recovered from the stern of the ship, we can fix the time of the ship's sinking to the last quarter of the 5th century. The bronze head must, then, have been made no later than some time late in the 5th century, although some scholars, seeing the sculpture out of its archaeological context, would have placed it in the 4th century... Sculpture formed only a small part of the cargo, which included in addition amphoras containing wine and possibly...

Genetic analysis has revealed the contents of an ancient shipwreck dating back to the era of the Roman Republic and Athenian Empire. The cargo was olive oil flavored with oregano. Beyond discovering ingredients for Italian salad dressing on the sea floor, such research could provide a wealth of insights concerning the everyday life of ancient seafaring civilizations that would otherwise be lost at sea. An international team of U.S. and Greek researchers investigated the remains of a 2,400-year-old shipwreck that lies 230 feet (70 meters) deep, roughly a half-mile (1 kilometer) off the coast of the Greek island of Chios...

A shipwreck located off the small uninhabited Cycladic island of Polyaigos in the central Aegean will be designated as an "underwater archaeological site" by Greece's Culture Ministry, the institution's representatives announced recently. The shipwreck, first spotted in 2004, was initially explored by underwater archaeologists in the fall of 2009, the Athens News Agency reported today. These excavations resulted in the discovery of valuable archaeological objects, including amphorae, ceramic vases and fragments of the vessel's anchor. In addition, the shipwreck was photographed and filmed in detail, which allowed the creation of a high-definition photo-mosaic, while procedures have been set in motion...

Foley and the archaeologists, meanwhile, are elated by the chance to learn more about the people on board the first-century bc ship, which carried luxury items from the eastern Mediterranean, probably intended for wealthy buyers in Rome. The skeleton discovery is a rare find, agrees Mark Dunkley, an underwater archaeologist from the London-based heritage organization Historic England. Unless covered by sediment or otherwise protected, the bodies of shipwreck victims are usually swept away and decay, or are eaten by fish. Complete skeletons have been recovered from younger ships, such as the sixteenth-century English warship the Mary Rose and the seventeenth-century...