(College Station)—Studying shipwrecks has long provided researchers with interesting insights into past civilizations, and the Kizilburun Shipwreck, which is being excavated by a team led by a Texas A&M University professor, has yielded a Doric column made of Proconnesian marble, a rarity for a shipwreck that dates from the first century B.C.
Deborah Carlson, a professor in the Department of Anthropology who specializes in trade and seafaring in the ancient world, is the archeological director for the excavation of the Kizilburun Shipwreck, which is located off the Aegean coast of Turkey.
“On this scale, a column of this size in the Doric style of architecture just seems so out of place with a first century B.C. date,” said Carlson. “I thought this can’t be, I thought maybe it was older: sixth, fifth or fourth century B.C.
“I was skeptical, but now that we have exposed much more of the various elements of the cargo, including other marble artifacts and ceramic jars for transporting oil and wine, it is clear to me that this Doric column was probably destined for a temple or some monumental structure when the ship sank in the first century B.C., which is really interesting and pretty unusual.”
Carlson, along with an international team of staff members from the Institute of Nautical Archeology and graduate students from the nautical archeology program at Texas A&M, began excavating Kizilburun in the summer of 2005 and will return to the site this June for their third season.
“I would say the excavation is probably about 60 percent complete,” said Carlson, who adds that she chose to work on the Kizilburun wreck because she was intrigued by its architectural elements.
What the team found upon its initial dive to the wreck was eight marble drums and a marble column capital which they believe were meant to be stacked together to make one enormous continual column, Carlson said.
Samples of the marble were taken and sent to Willamette University in Oregon where isotopic and maximum grain size analyses were done to help determine where the marble originated.
“The analyses were able to tell us with some certainty that the marble originated on this little island in the Sea of Marmara which is called Proconnesus Island,” Carlson said. “In the third, fourth and fifth century A.D., it becomes a very heavily exploited source of ancient white marble. Our shipwreck seems to be evidence for the fairly early quarrying or exploitation of the marble from that source.”
Additionally, said Carlson, the fact that the marble was on a ship and was being ferried from Proconnesus to some distant point, adds another element of interest to the excavation of the Kizilburun shipwreck.
“In the ancient world, in almost every situation, the ancients would rely on local marble sources,” said Carlson. “They were not in the habit of quarrying and shipping marble great distances if they didn’t have to, which makes perfect sense.
“Proconnesian marble, we know, was quarried as early as the sixth century BC, but it began to appear regularly in monumental buildings at nearby Troy and Pergamum in the third and second centuries B.C. The location of the Kizilburun shipwreck, further south along the Aegean coast, seems to suggest that this marble was actually headed somewhere that was a fairly long distance from its source.”
That brings up the question of just where the marble was destined for. Possibilities include the southern parts of Turkey and Egypt, said Carlson.
“That is one question people ask: Where was this ship going?” Carlson said. “It may never be answered with 100 percent certainty, but I think when we are able to sit down and look at all the artifacts and get some kind of perspective on what we have found, we may be able to get pretty close.
“Now that we have exposed much more of the cargo, in particular we have coins and various other elements of the marble cargo, it is clear to me that this is in fact a Doric column, probably destined for a temple or some monumental structure in the first century B.C.”
The team will return to the site in June to spend about 12 weeks to continue with the excavation of the Kizilburun shipwreck. To date, four of the eight marble drums have been removed from the site, and Carlson said they hope to remove the remaining four this summer.
The drums, which weigh as much as seven tons each, are removed so the team can excavate the hull of the ship, which will help them get a better idea of where and how this ship was built.
“Hopefully we will be able to expose anything and everything that’s left of the hull,” said Carlson. “I am relatively optimistic that this summer, if there is any hope, we are going to get a good look at what is down there.” 