Cape Gelidonya
Cape Gelidonya (Turkish: Gelidonya Burnu or Taşlık Burnu) near Finike, Turkey is the site of a late Bronze Age shipwreck (c. 1200 BC). In view of the cargo's nature and composition the excavators have proposed a possible levantine provenance.[1] The remains of the ship sat at a depth of about 27 m,[2] on irregular rocky bottom. It was located in 1954, and the excavation began in 1960 by Peter Throckmorton, George F. Bass, and Frédéric Dumas. Among the finds were Mycenaean pottery, scrape copper, copper and tin ingots, merchant weights.
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[edit] History
The eccentric photojournalist Peter Throckmorton, out of New York, arrived their in the mid 1950s after a controversial campaign where he was profiling the Algerian War from the point of view of the Algerian rebels fighting against French troops, which would later lead to an alleged altercation between himself and another team member, Claude Duthuit, who was fighting with the French. Throckmorton arrived in the small city of Bodrum in the southwest of Turkey, built on the ancient city of Halicarnassus, where the remnants of one of the ancient wonder of the world the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus can still be seen today. He had received word that a bronze statues of the Greek god Demeter was pulled up by fishing nets and left on the beach, but by the time he had arrived the statue was taken and would eventually find a home in the Museum of Izmir, north of Bodrum.
Throckmorton came to know Captain Kemal of the sponge fishing boat the Mandlinci. The captain told Throckmorton that he knew of many ancients sites that were lying on the seabed, one he planned to dynamite the following year. Throckmorton urged him to preserve the site and convinced the Captain to draw of map, allegedly on the back of a napkin. He would return in 1958 under the flag of the Explorers' Club with filmmaker Stan Waterman among others. They set out to a number of underwater archaeological sites and finally arrived at Cape Gelidonya, where they spent most of their time trying to identify the site, but finally on the last day located the site on one of the small islands off the Cape.
He convinced the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to sponsor an excavation of the site. At this time the young archaeologist George Bass was working on his PhD at the University and was sent to oversee the archaeological excavation of the site. They returned in 1960 and completed the first archaeological excavation of a shipwreck underwater in its entirety. This was the oldest known shipwreck at the time only being surpassed by the discovery of the Uluburun Shipwreck in the early 1980s. This was one the first project that led to the development of the field of Nautical Archaeology, along with the excavation of the Viking Skuldelev ships at Roskilde in 1962, and the discovery and raising of the Swedish warship the Vasa (ship) in 1961.
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[edit] References
- ^ Sarah P. Morris, Daidalos and the origins of Greek art, Princeton University Press (19952), p.103.
- ^ Cline, Eric H. (2012). The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean. Oxford University Press. pp. 797. ISBN 0199873607. http://books.google.cz/books?id=9vueDKFX8rQC&pg=PA797&dq=gelidonya+shipwreck&hl=cs&sa=X&ei=uhM5T5nFN-fb4QTR4KmhCw&ved=0CD0QuwUwAA#v=onepage&q=gelidonya%20shipwreck&f=false.
[edit] External links
Coordinates: 36°38′10″N 30°33′26″E / 36.63611°N 30.55722°E
