The Uluburun shipwreck: an overview

Bronze Age metal artefacts found on Cyprus - metal from Anatolia and the Western Mediterranean

“…The contacts between people inhabiting the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea were certainly enhanced in the Late Bronze Age due to the improvements in boat building. The famous Uluburun shipwreck that sunk off the south-east coast of Turkey around 1317 BC proves how much cargo such comparatively small ships could carry: ten tons of copper, one ton of tin, hundreds of pieces of pottery, glass ingots and many other items (Bass 1987;Pulak 1998Pulak , 2001Pulak and 2005. At the end of the 2 nd millennium BC a considerable quantity of copper from Cyprus reached Sardinia in the shape of oxhide ingots (Stos-Gale and Gale 1992;Gale 1999;Kassianidou 2001), so it seems most likely that at that time ships similar to Uluburun might have been sailing across the whole width of the Mediterranean Sea.…”

The Sawflies of Crete (Hymenoptera, Symphyta)

“…Particularly sawflies that feed on plants important to humans can be suspected to have been introduced to regions outside their native ranges by human activity. Seaborne trade across the eastern Mediterranean is evident by Crete's Old Palace Period (c. 2000-1600, and Crete and Cyprus were important trade centres in the later 2nd millenium BCE (Wardle 1997, Pulak 1998. The use of common plants from the eastern Mediterranean shoreline as dunnage, or packing material, on ships of this period (Bass et al 1967;Pulak 1998) represents another potential means of human-induced colonisation, involving sawfly species attached to plants which have no obvious direct use to humans.…”

“…Seaborne trade across the eastern Mediterranean is evident by Crete's Old Palace Period (c. 2000-1600, and Crete and Cyprus were important trade centres in the later 2nd millenium BCE (Wardle 1997, Pulak 1998. The use of common plants from the eastern Mediterranean shoreline as dunnage, or packing material, on ships of this period (Bass et al 1967;Pulak 1998) represents another potential means of human-induced colonisation, involving sawfly species attached to plants which have no obvious direct use to humans. Long before recognisable trade patterns became evident, colonisation by humans using boats occurred, and the colonists can be assumed to have brought quantities of plant-derived material with them.…”

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles as Tools for Deep-Submergence Archaeology

“…Beyond the numerous issues and questions related to the overall methodology, site preservation, object recovery, and treatment of cultural artefacts, there are enormous technical challenges. Successful excavations with scuba divers have taken a decade to complete [46]. For such projects, AUVs offer a compelling efficiency in documenting the progress of an excavation carried out by divers or ROVs.…”

“…Detailed investigations of archaeological sites underwater have been carried out by human divers for the past several decades [44][45][46]. Frequently these are efforts of enormous undertaking requiring thousands of man-hours to complete over multi-year field seasons.…”