Do fundo do mar... Sea bottom

Some want artifacts exhumed, but officials preach caution over PCBs

FORT EDWARD -- Imagine finding an unexpected gift. But you can't open it or touch it. And in fact, not long after you discover it, it must be destroyed. Permanently. If you're lucky, you can take a picture of it.

That's roughly the situation for upper Hudson River residents who embrace the area's rich history. An archaeological firm hired by the General Electric Co. to survey the river bottom and shoreline before the massive PCB dredging project begins next year has unearthed some unexpected treasures.

Sonar and diving teams have found up to seven boats, including one that may date to the 18th century. The remains can provide clues about history, from prehistoric Native American settlements to the French and Indian War and beyond.

But a preliminary report, not yet made public, suggests the artifacts won't be pulled out of the water -- because they're too polluted with PCBs. So, as of now, the rich material will be dug up and processed as toxic waste, just like the rest of the 2.65 million cubic yards of PCB-laden muck that is to be dredged.

That infuriates locals such as Neal Orsini, who owns the Anvil Inn, a restaurant and hotel on the site of what used to be Fort Edward itself.

"We don't want our history scooped up and taken away," Orsini said. "Let's get in there and pull it out."

Federal environmental officials are telling locals that no final decisions have been made. The Environmental Protection Agency's regional administrator, Alan Steinberg, announced at a community meeting this week that "wherever possible, I want artifacts saved. We want to work closely with GE to make sure (they) aren't smashed."

But Fort Edward area residents who serve on a local cultural resources committee that received a draft assessment of the river bottom's archaeology a few weeks ago said the message is clear: little can be pulled out of the river.

That is especially true for the wooden portions of boats and barges. The material soaked up the oily PCBs, rendering it toxic and possibly dangerous even to handle.

But why are pottery or metal artifacts unrecoverable, locals ask.

PCBs are mostly a hazard when they are ingested, such as from contaminated fish. No one plans on offering 19th-century pot shards or military hardware to schoolchildren as a tasty appetizer.
"This metal can be saved," said Eileen Hannay, manager of the Rogers Island Visitors Center, a small museum which offers exhibits on Fort Edward's history.

The area that will be dredged first is where the Hudson wraps around each side of the island.

On the south side of Rogers Island are two areas with shipwrecks that researchers believe won't need to be disturbed by the dredging. Hannay said one possibility is to leave those in place and build some sort of kiosk nearby so visitors could learn about the ships. When the water level recedes, a portion of each is visible.

Pulling all the artifacts up isn't necessarily the best use of resources, even if there are no contamination issues, said John Vetter, the EPA's national expert on archaeology and the National Historic Preservation Act.

One alternative, he said, is to map the fragments embedded in the river bottom. Then the visitor's center or other group could build replicas for a display.

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Dayton Daily News
By Jessica Wehrman
February 26, 2006


Famed Frenchman Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, is remembered for his exploration of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, but he died haunted by a mystery that lingers centuries later.

What had happened to Le Griffon, the pride of La Salle's fleet, which disappeared in 1679 on Lake Michigan during its maiden voyage?

In the decades after the death of La Salle, rumors and theories abounded about the Griffon's fate. Some say it fell to Indian marauders, who stole its bounty of fur and killed its crew. More likely, it hit a devastating storm and sank.

Steve Libert, a Dayton-area native and amateur explorer, has spent 30 years, hundreds of thousands of dollars and unaccountable energy trying to solve the mystery.

Now, at 51, he believes he might have done so.

In 2001, during one of dozens of his scuba expeditions, Libert literally ran into what initially seemed an errant piece of timber at the bottom of the lake.

Additional research led him to believe that timber is the part of the Griffon, and he has enlisted Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, the nation of France and a loyal team of Dayton-area explorers to see if he's right.

In July, they will be joined by a team of French and Canadian archaeologists to begin to explore the wreckage Libert has found.

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The Republican
February 23, 2006

DAUPHIN ISLAND -- A group of 10 men and women worked with brooms, buckets of water and a backhoe Friday, slowly digging away sand to reveal a 35-foot section of what could be a 19th century shipwreck buried underneath a storm-damaged west end house.

Exactly where the crew was going to put the ship fragment once they finished excavating it from the spot where Hurricane Rita had deposited it five months ago was still an open question Friday.

"What these people have accomplished in this short a time is incredible," said Glenn Forest, a marine archaeologist who earlier this week stopped a repair crew at the house from breaking up the structure. "What we're concentrating on at the moment is getting it out of harm's way."

Thursday and Friday, two dozen people from along the Gulf Coast responded to Forest's call for volunteers to help him excavate what he thinks could be a portion of the 19th century clipper cargo ship Robert H. Dixey.

The Dixey sank near the mouth of Mobile Bay after striking the sand bar now known as Dixey Bar during a hurricane in 1860. The 165-foot clipper ship was built in Boston in 1855.

"It just seemed like the right thing to do," said Robert Varner, a retired bail bondsman from Semmes who on Thursday brought his backhoe to help Forest.

As he sat at the backhoe's controls, Varner said he's had an interest in maritime history since he was a U.S. Navy submariner in the late 1960s.

Another volunteer, Hugh Bodden of Pascagoula, said it was a fascination with his own family history that had him brushing sand from the ship fragment with a broom Friday.

"My great-grandfather was a sailing ship captain from Grand Cayman who ended up in Pascagoula," said Bodden, a construction consultant. "

Forest said the crew will likely have the fragment removed from under the house by today or Sunday. He hoped to store it on a concrete slab behind the island's Marine Resources Division office.

Vernon Minton, Marine Resources Division director, said he needs more information first. He wants to get the Alabama Historical Commission's opinion of the fragment's value, plus an estimate from Forest of how long the shipwreck's stay would be.

The shipwreck fragment may have been tossed around the island by storms for at least 45 years. Mobile Register articles dating back to 1960 refer to a similarly described fragment.

In one of those articles, representatives of the Alabama Historical Commission state that wreckage appears to have no historic significance.

Forest asserted, however, that the piece he is working on now should be treated as a potentially important find.

Forest attended graduate schools in marine archaeology at East Carolina University and Texas A&M University, university officials said. One of his instructors, Donny Hamilton, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, has said Forest has the expertise to identify such shipwreck fragments.

After a fragment -- possibly the same as the one battered by Katrina and Rita -- was exposed by Hurricane Georges in 1998, an Alabama Historical Commission crew re-covered it with sand, saying the chance of excavating items of historical value from it was low and the chance of losing the fragment to deterioration under the sun's rays was high.

Elizabeth Brown, the commission's interim director, said this week that anyone trying to remove the fragment would not need a Historical Commission permit since it was on private property.

As Katrina submerged the island's west end on Aug. 29, it picked up the fragment and smashed into a nearby house. On Sept. 24, Hurricane Rita slung it under another house, where it came to rest.

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CDNN
By Lamar Bennington
February 24, 2006


Malta - Authorities in Malta have fined a British scuba diver for attempting to steal a shipwreck artifact.

Gavin Lee Howard, 34, was fined $1,400 for stealing a small spherical glass from a submerged ship in Maltese waters.

Following the lead of notorious dive industry-endorsed shipwreck looters Leigh Bishop and Brad Sheard, a small but rapidly increasing number of scuba divers are looting shipwrecks around the world for bragging rights, coffee table displays and internet auction sales that conceal profits from tax authorities.

Despite 'take pictures, leave only bubbles' green-wash, a small but strident group of wreck diving looters steal artifacts from shipwrecks under the guise of 'archaeological exploration', and aggressively compete for bragging rights, product endorsements and profits from the sales of stolen artifacts that are now on a par with those from smuggling humans and drugs.

"Self-aggrandizing looters and grave robbing cowboys such as Leigh Bishop and Brad Sheard are beneath contempt...the vast majority of the global scuba diving community opposes shipwreck looting and underwater grave robbing," said CDS President Evan T. Allard.

"For scuba divers, every shipwreck is an underwater museum to be fully protected for our children, our grandchildren and all future generations of divers who will dive deeper and longer thanks to ongoing improvements in diving technology ," Allard added.

"It is absolutely imperative that the global scuba diving community, archaeologists, coast guards, police and tax authorities act now to prevent shipwreck looters from exploiting and destroying sunken ships for their personal coffee table displays, internet self-promotion schemes and tax-evasion scams."


CYBER DIVER ALERT
If you have information pertaining to the theft and/or sale of wreck artifacts, or desecration of underwater grave sites by Leigh Bishop, Brad Sheard, organized crime gangs or anyone else, please contact CDNN immediately and your information will be passed along to appropriate authorities.

REPORT SCUBA LOOTER


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www.dofundodomar.blogspot.com

KUALA LUMPUR -- Tijgerhaai and Zwaardis, both Dutch submarines, that was once offered for sale to Malaysia will end up in the scrapyard.

The diesel-powered submarines were stranded in Lumut for the last five years.

PSC Naval Dockyard's Submarine Department Head Muhammad Razalina said the submarines could no longer move unless major repairs are done on the engines.

"A tender to dismantle the submarines will be called by the Dutch government soon. We will get the tender as they are in Lumut," he told Bernama.

The owner of the submarines, Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij (RDM), had accumulated debts as it had to pay PSC for the safekeeping service and the rental of the wharf for the last five years, he said.

The debt had been settled by the Dutch government, he said.

Tijgerhaai and Zwaardis came to Lumut five years ago after RDM enlisted PSC as its partner in a bid to sell them to Malaysia for training purpose.

The same tactic was done by German Naval Group (GNG) who collaborated with PSC to win a tender to build 27 patrol vessels. The tactic was successful as the tie-up provided GNG the upperhand over its competitor from Australia.

Many were convinced that RDM would secure the contract as the submarines were already in Malaysia.

Many also thought that the vessels in fact had been purchased by the Royal Malaysian Navy.

Among RDM's competitors in the submarine project were Kockums whose submarines are used by Singapore, DCN International and another German company that offered Type 209 submarines.

DCN International won the bid. It is now building two diesel-powered Scorpene submarines and an Agosta-class submarine for training.

When RDM lost the bid, Tijgerhaai dan Zwaardis were stranded. The bills to safekeep the vessels and to allow them to stay in Lumut have accumulated into millions of American dollars.

According to the Dutch press, the Dutch government was concerned that the submarines could be seized by the Malaysian authorities because RDM owed a big sum to PSC.

They were also worried if their technology used in the submarines were to slip into the hands of a foreign party.

RDM could not do anything because of its weak financial position.

Not only Malaysia that had refused to buy, Egypt and Indonesia also declined the 40-year-old submarines.

Finally, the Dutch government intervened and forked out its own money to pay RDM's debts and the cost of dismantling the submarines that is expected to be carried out in Lumut this year.

Several large vermillion-lacquered wood fragments believed to be part of a funeral boat were unearthed at the Suyama ancient tomb in Koryocho, Nara Prefecture, the local board of education has announced.

The fragments bear inscribed patterns and were unearthed from the moat surrounding the tomb, which dates from the late fourth century.

Researchers said the fragments were part of a funeral boat that was used to transport human remains from a mortuary to a tomb over land.

One of the fragments is a piece of Japanese cedar measuring 3.7 meters long, 45 centimeters wide and five centimeters thick. It was originally part of an 8.2-meter-long piece of wood believed to be from one side of the boat. The fragment is decorated with triple concentric circles, intended to ward off evil spirits, and a beltlike pattern.

A piece of Japanese cinnamon measuring 2.1 meters long, 78 centimeters wide and 25 centimeters thick, is believed to be part of a coffin lid, and was originally part of a four-meter-long piece of wood. It is adorned with straight and curved lines and also triple concentric circles. The fragment retains some of its original vermillion lacquer finish.

If these fragments were to be assembled, they would suggest the shape of a boat with upward arching pointed ends, like a gondola, with a coffin on it.

The boat is similar to one described in a seventh-century Chinese book: "The remains of a noble are kept outside a mortuary for three years. Then, for the burial, they are put into a boat and carried over land."

The Suyama tomb is a 220-meter-long keyhole-shaped mound. An emperor or another person of exalted status is believed to have been buried in the tomb.

The unearthed items will be on display to the public March 4-5 at the town's cultural property preservation center.

Prof. Kunihiko Kawakami of Kobe Yamate University, who is an archaeologist, said: "It may have been placed at a mortuary, and after sending the remains to a tomb, it may have been destroyed and thrown away. For the first time, we have clarification of a funeral ritual that reproduces the world of myth."

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The daily News Journal
By Cindy Watts
February 16, 2006


This time of year, Murfreesboro CPA Jon D. Jaques is usually up to his neck in W2s.

However, this tax season Jaques made time to dive into one of his favorite pastimes — submarines.

An avid collector of submarine memorabilia, Jaques loaned approximately 50 percent of his massive collection to the Murfreesboro/Rutherford County Center for the Arts in February for its "Dive!Dive!Dive!" exhibit.

"Including photographs, I probably have about 4,000 different things," says Jaques. "I've been collecting submarine memorabilia for 20 years."

Jaques' fascination with submarines started as a child on a trip to Chicago's Science and Industry Museum.

"They had a German U-boat U505 and I didn't even go into the rest of the museum," he recalls. "I just kept taking the same tour of the U-boat."

As an adult, he volunteered for submarine service with the U.S. Navy.

"I spent seven tours on submarine Ohio," he says. "Each tour would be 2 1/2 months, and you would go out and stay submerged until the end of patrol."

Jaques recalls his first deployment in the submarine as terrifying, but says his fear didn't quell his fascination.

"You get into deep water and you start hearing all the metal moan and groan," he recalls. "It's a scary thing. After 30 days you start getting stir crazy. I mean, imagine taking this room and painting all the walls black with no air conditioning. We just recirculated used air and there was all kinds of machinery running, so it created a lot of heat. There was a lot more mental preparation than I was expecting, and after the first month there's no fresh food."

Jaques started his collection while he was still in the Navy, but didn't really start accumulating material until he became a serious student of submarine history after his discharge.

Today, more than 20 years after Jaques was initially submerged, he still wants to share the enchantments of submarines with anyone who has the desire to learn.

"What I want to do eventually is have a small submarine museum," says Jaques. "I want to do that as a retirement project."

For more information, call 904-2787.

Local author's research used in History Channel program
PORT CLINTON --A Port Clinton man recently added his expertise to help forge a History Channel documentary that questions the theory behind one of maritime history's most infamous disasters.

With two critically acclaimed nautical books to his credit, David G. Brown, 62, 1853 S. Bay Drive, said he helped trace the final hours of Titanic for the documentary, "Titanic's Final Moments: Missing Pieces," which airs at 9 p.m. Sunday.

Titanic was an ocean liner that sank with about 1,500 people aboard during its maiden voyage in April of 1912. Most people believe Titanic sank after sideswiping an iceberg in the North Atlantic, Brown said. The ice is thought to have ripped a hole in Titanic's right side, causing the vessel to slowly take on water in its bow until the stern stuck straight out of the water. Once the ship became vertical, Titanic started its two and a half mile descent to the ocean floor, splitting in half along the way.

But evidence in the documentary shows Titanic grounded and then freed itself from an immersed piece of ice. In addition, the ship never reached a vertical position before sinking, Brown said. He maintains a 90 foot piece of steel supporting Titanic's bottom snapped shortly after the stern lifted out of the water.

"Titanic broke when the bow was tipped down at an angle of (about) 11 degrees," Brown said. "The ship did not break apart because it sank. It sank because it broke apart."

Brown said divers in a miniature submarine found the 90-foot beam in two 45-foot pieces last year near the wreck. Although Brown concedes his theory is just that, he said the two pieces of steel on the ocean's bottom help support his claim.

"The edges of the (steel) indicate it broke under tension -- not compression of being tipped up (vertically) in the air," he said. "We are talking about a substantial piece of steel."

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al.com
By Russ Henderson
February 23, 2006


DAUPHIN ISLAND -- With a short black shovel, Glenn Forest crouched Wednesday in the sand under one of the hundreds of Hurricane Katrina-wrecked homes on this island's west end.

He uncovered a section of wooden hull here, a length of iron-ringed mast there -- indications, he said, of a possibly historic 45-foot ship fragment.

Hours before, he had stopped a repair crew at the house from breaking up the structure.

"They were going to cut it up and haul it to the dump. This could be an important piece of Alabama history," said Forest, a marine archaeologist from Mobile. "We can't let that happen."

Forest said he hopes volunteers will come forward today to help him unearth what he thinks could be a portion of the 19th century clipper cargo ship Robert H. Dixey, which sank near the mouth of Mobile Bay after striking the nearby sand bar now known as Dixey Bar during a hurricane in 1860.

The 165-foot clipper ship was built in Boston in 1855 and was used to haul merchandise (mainly cotton) from Mobile to Eastern Europe.

As Katrina's tidal surge submerged the island's west end on Aug. 29, it picked up the massive ship fragment and smashed into a nearby house. On Sept. 24, Hurricane Rita slung it under another house, letting it come to rest after it snapped one of the house's pilings in two.

On Wednesday morning, the rental house's manager was getting ready to start cutting the ship fragment up, pulling the pieces out with a backhoe, then taking them to a county landfill.

Forest happened to be nearby. He was actually looking for the ship fragment as part of his now yearlong research to find the identity of another ship fragment on display in the parking lot of Fort Gaines on the island's east end. Forest initially thought the Fort Gaines fragment belonged to the British warship H.M.S. Hermes but said he now suspects both fragments are pieces of the Dixey.

After looking in the spot where the fragment beached itself after Katrina, Forest happened to meet Randy Fletcher, the property manager of a nearby rental home. Fletcher told Forest that the ship fragment was under his boss's house and said he was getting ready to start removing it today.

Forest asked Fletcher not to do that. He would try to organize a crew to remove it and preserve it, he said.

Forest said he didn't know exactly where he will be able to keep the piece of wreckage once it's excavated and that he hopes local governments and organizations will step forward to help.

The hull of the fragment is more than a foot and a half thick, with decomposing iron nails that have managed to hold it together for decades. Forest said it's likely made of white pine -- the favored wood of the Northern shipbuilders at the time. The segment probably weighs thousands of pounds, he said.

The ship fragment has been migrating from place to place on the island for decades, periodically unearthed by tropical storms and hurricanes, said Greg Spies, a Coden land surveyor and archaeologist.

Spies said that since he isn't a marine archaeologist, he isn't qualified to judge whether the artifact is significant. But he agreed with Forest that the fragment could be important, and some attempt should be made to preserve it.

While the wreckage is on the Alabama Historical Commission's records, the commission doesn't regard it as being archaeologically significant, commission officials said.

Contacted Wednesday about the ship fragment, Elizabeth Brown, the commission's interim director, said that anyone seeking to remove it would first need a coastal zone permit from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

They would not need a permit from the Historical Commission, she said. Attempts to contact ADEM's coastal office were unsuccessful Wednesday afternoon.

Anyone wishing to help Forest remove the shipwreck should call him at 786-0666.

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Post-Gazette
By Phil Cannaday
February 21, 2006

ST. LOUIS - Generations of schoolbooks have portrayed the arrival of the first modern humans to America as an epic ice-age hike across a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, then a dash between glaciers covering the west and east of Canada.

But scientists who have devoted much of their careers over the past several decades to better understanding of the peopling of the Americas are increasingly doubtful that the first arrivals only walked into the hemisphere, if they walked at all. Instead, evidence is growing that they paddled, or floated, much of the way, perhaps via the Atlantic as well as the Pacific.

"The coastal-migration theory has yet to be proven with hard evidence, but we have been finding earlier and more widespread evidence for coastal settlement around the Pacific Rim," said Jon Erlandson, an anthropologist at the University of Oregon who spoke during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here over the weekend.

In particular, his team shows how migration routes may have followed giant kelp forests growing along Pacific Rim coastlines even in the deepest freeze of the last ice age more than 20,000 years ago.

On the other side of the continent, Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington over the past decade or so has seen a growing list of archaeological sites from Spain and Britain and from Florida to Virginia to Wisconsin lend support to his theory that bands of sea-mammal hunters living on the edge of Europe reached the New World in numbers sufficient to found colonies 5,000 years or more before any land bridge might have been available.

"The objection has been that people living in the far north couldn't have gotten across the Atlantic because they didn't have boats; that they didn't venture out into the ocean ice. But they did have boats, and if they were anything like those the Eskimos have been using for thousands of years, some of the boats could carry 18-20 adults hundreds of miles," Stanford said.

The discoveries reflect change in the way researchers are going about studying prehistoric culture, turning to colleagues who have expertise in everything from ancient climate and prehistoric animals to ecologists.

Paleoanthropology has traditionally been mostly about stone tools, particularly blades more or less skillfully flaked into knives, spear points and axes. How a tool was made, and from what sort of material, tells experts a lot about who made it; a little radiocarbon dating of organic material, often charcoal, found around the tools, tells them when they were made, usually within a few hundred years each way.

Until recently, most of the older stone implements found in North and Central America seemed to have been made with the same technique by people dubbed the Clovis culture, for the first material found in New Mexico during the 1930s, and dated back to no more than about 11,500 years ago.

A few sites in Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that held tools of different styles that seemed to be as much as 10,000 years older had been largely written off, until more old tools coming from layers dating back 14,000, 17,000, even 50,000 years ago started turning up along the East Coast. And diverse sites in South America have yielded artifacts dating to 33,000 years ago, although controversies about methods used to date sites are a staple of the field.

Stanford, who has spent much of his career studying cultures around the Arctic, was among the first to note that spear points and other tools found on the East Coast have a lot in common with points made by a Stone Age culture known as Solutrean, centered in what's now Southwestern France.

In recent years, he and colleagues have found strong evidence in the form of bones, paintings and other items in coastal caves of Spain that Solutreans used harpoons and boats to go out into icy waters and hunt seals, walrus and auks. And they've worked with ancient-climate specialists to establish that sea icepack extended that far south in the Atlantic during the last ice age.

One of the problems in proving this frozen-highway theory in the Atlantic has been that any coastal camps the hunters may have used now lie submerged well out on the continental shelf due to rising sea level. However, Stanford noted that some promising artifacts - along with walrus bones - have turned up recently at new sites around the Chesapeake Bay, for instance.

In the Pacific, Erlandson and many other paleoanthropologists have found and excavated camps of marine hunters at many spots along the coast, particularly offshore islands. What's been missing is something to connect them as a migration route.

It is known that seafaring people lived at least as far north as Japan at the height of the last glacial period, but a team of marine biologists and other specialists helped Erlandson demonstrate how the fish- and mammal-rich kelp forests ran in an arch all the way from the Kurile Islands to Alaska and along all or most of the Pacific Coast. The kelp beds not only ensured food, but also could have helped protect small boats from big waves and served as mooring points.

"The fact that these productive kelp forests are found adjacent to some of the earliest coastal archaeological sites in the Americas really enhances the argument that the first Americans didn't walk here, they floated. In essence, they may have utilized a sort of kelp highway," Erlandson said.

On the Net: www.aaas.org

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Al-Ahram
16 - 22 February 2006
Issue No. 782


Well-preserved wrecks of Pharaonic seafaring vessels unearthed last week on the Red Sea coast reveal that the Ancient Egyptians enjoyed advanced maritime technology, Nevine El-Aref reports.

The long-held belief that the Ancient Egyptians did not tend to travel long distances by sea because of poor naval technology proved fallacious last week when timbers, rigging and cedar planks were unearthed in the ancient Red Sea port of Marsa Gawasis, 23 kilometres south of Port Safaga.

The remains of seafaring vessels were found in four large, hand-hewn caves which were probably used as storage or boat houses from the Middle Kingdom to the early New Kingdom periods. Early examination revealed that each cave measured 60 square metres and had an entrance constructed of reused anchors, limestone blocks and wooden beams. Other stone anchors were located outside the entrances.

One of these caves contains more than 80 perfectly preserved coils of different sized ropes which were once used on ships. The Italian mission director, Rodolfo Fattovich of the University of Naples " l'Orientale ", says: "Today, we have access to the rear of the cave and we can see that most of its walls are concealed with these coils of lines, each about a metre long and 60cms wide. Each bundle of ropes represents from at least 20 to 30 metres of line."

Fattovich said that in the second cave the rope bundles were easily visible from the entrance; they had horizontal wraps of 18 turns around one-metre vertical loops. "It is really spectacular," he said.

Egyptologist Mohamed Mustafa, a specialist in maritime archaeology, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the amount of rigging discovered in Marsa Gawasis was the largest ever found.

The pieces of rigging are very fragile, but consolidation work will be carried out before restoration to facilitate their transportation to the on-site restoration laboratory. Mustafa said that rigging was considered highly important and was very costly. According to Old Kingdom inscriptions, a 1000-metre length of riggings was worth 40 head of cattle, and during the New Kingdom it cost the price of a bull.

"This is a very important discovery and sheds light on Ancient Egyptian naval technology and the elaborate ancient Red Sea trade network," Mustafa told the Weekly. He said that people tend to assume that the Egyptians did not do many long-distance trips because very few remains of these sites have been found. Based on this belief, they also thought that Punt was located in southern Sinai and not in southern Sudan or the Eritrean region of Ethiopia.

Large, well-preserved ships' planks and their fastenings were also unearthed, and the presence of extensive damage to the planks by marine worms or borers provides irrefutable evidence of seafaring. Most of the timbers were in a context that indicated their reuse in ramps and walkways, but many were significantly reworked.

Analyses made by Rainer Gerisch of the Free University, Berlin, on the different types of wood used in boat construction revealed that it was imported from far and wide: from Syria and Palestine to the Nile Valley and Red Sea mountains.

Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), is enthusiastic about the find. "It is very exciting," he says. "It reveals the world's oldest remains of seafaring ships." Hawass says a deposit of 21 plastered wooden boxes of ships' cargo was found buried in sand outside the caves. One of these boxes bears a painted inscription saying: "the wonderful products of Punt", indicating that the boxes once contained cargo imported from Punt. The boxes also bear a partially preserved cartouche of Pharaoh Amenemhat III, who ruled about 1,800 B.C. "This inscriptions was very carefully recorded on site but could not be preserved as the state of preservation of the wood was very bad," Hawass says.

Fragments of pottery marked with the 12th- Dynasty seal imprint were scattered near the boxes, and a stela with the five names of Amenemhat III was installed in a niche. Archaeologists also discovered two ostraca, of which one seems to be an administrative board recording food provisions. Both ostraca are now under comprehensive study by El-Sayed Mahfouz from Assiut University. That these ostraca should have been preserved with little damage for so long is unusual. Indeed the preservation of organic material in the caves is truly remarkable.

"This discovery is shedding light on other aspects of the Red Sea trade," Hawass says. Inside the small cave the team found fragments of pottery that the Italian archaeologists believe originated in Yemen, which suggests that Egyptians either sailed further than had been previously thought or were part of a more complex trade network.

A geophysical survey with a magnetometre was conducted on site, revealing some interesting anomalies at the base of the western and southern slopes of Marsa Gawasis's fossilised-coral terrace. Geo-physicist Glen Dash said that a test excavation in correspondence to a long anomaly at the southern slope suggested that this could be an ancient shoreline. Shells found here contain a great quantity of marine organisms, which means that the bay was much deeper in the past. Close to this shore line, a large conglomerate anchor and Middle Kingdom potsherds were found. Meanwhile, geo-archaeological investigations carried out support the hypothesis that the mouth of Marsa Gawasis was originally a lagoon.

Sailing to Punt required a tremendous investment of manpower. Egyptian shipbuilders harvested cedarwood from the mountains of Lebanon and transported it up the Nile to a shipbuilding site, where the vessels were first assembled and then disassembled into travel-ready pieces that could be carried on a 10-day journey across about 100 miles of desert to the coast.

Based on texts discovered more than a century ago, researchers have known that Egyptians mounted naval expeditions to Punt as far back as the Old Kingdom to obtain gold, ebony, ivory, leopard skins and the frankincense necessary for religious rituals. The hides of giraffe, panther and cheetah, which were worn by temple priests, were imported along with live exotic animals -- either for the priests' own menageries or as religious sacrifices -- including the sacred cynocephalus or dog-faced baboon. Little wonder, then, that Punt became known as the "Land of the Gods", and as the personal pleasure garden of the great god Amun.

Trade between Egypt and Punt appears to have been suspended after the 12th Dynasty and not resumed until early in the 18th, when the most famous expedition to Punt, that of Queen Hatshepsut, came as an outcome of a consultation with the oracle of the god Amun in which she was instructed to send a fleet of ships there. The expedition is featured in relief in Hatshepsut's mortuary temple at Deir Al-Bahari. It portrays a total of 10 ships, five entering harbour and five loading and setting sail. It is assumed that the ships were prefabricated on the Nile at Coptos, a point where it most closely approaches the Red Sea, and were then stripped down and the components transported through Wadi Hammamat by donkey caravan to Quseir, where they were reassembled. On completion of the mission to Punt, an often dangerous journey, and the equally dangerous return journey to the Egyptian port, the ships had to be stripped down again and their parts carried back through the desert valley along with their rich cargoes to the Nile, where they would be reassembled, reloaded, and set sail to Thebes.

What triggered Fattovich and his colleague Kathryn A Bard from Boston University to work at the Marsa Gawasis site for five consecutive archaeological seasons was their quest to solve the enigma of an African civilisation. During the 1990s, both archaeologists had conducted a 10- year excavation near Aksum, Ethiopia, where they found evidence of a previously unknown period in African history. However when war broke out along the Eritrean border in 1998, they decided to relocate to the Egyptian coast. The team first went to Marsa Gawasis in 2001 to investigate, as they describe it, "the other end of the Red Sea trade."

Fattovich selected the site because Egyptian archaeologist Abdel-Moneim Sayed from Alexandria University had identified it in the 1970s as the likely location of the ancient seaport of Saaw, known from texts as the departure point for expeditions to Punt. The team limits its excavation to the six weeks between semesters each winter, avoiding the extreme heat and humidity during the summer.

Thrilled by the recent cave discoveries, Mustafa notes that they have only begun to learn the secrets of Marsa Gawasis. "I'm sure there are more caves we haven't excavated yet," he says. "It was the find of a lifetime and there's much more to discover there."


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A HUGE bronze Nazi eagle from one of Hitler's most famous warships is to be sold at auction after it was salvaged off the coast of South America.

Bids have already reached £15million for the 6ft, 400kg bird - clutching a wreath with a swastika and designed by Hitler - taken from the wreck of the Admiral Graf Spee off Uruguay.

The ship fought the legendary Battle of the River Plate with four British cruisers led by Commodore Henry Harwood in the first major naval confrontation of the Second World War.

PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. - Divers plan to be back in Lake Champlain later this year to recover more artifacts from an important Revolutionary War battle.Researchers have spent the past several years mapping the lake bottom off of Valcour Island, near Plattsburgh. Numerous objects retrieved from the site of the Battle of Valcour have been included in a traveling exhibit highlighting the underwater archaeology project.

The October 1776 battle pitted the British against America's first navy -- a fleet of ships built at Whitehall, New York under the command of Benedict Arnold. The redcoats won the battle, but Arnold's force delayed a British invasion of New York for another year.

The archaeology project is organized by Vermont's Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. Project leaders are in discussion with the Navy and New York state to get approval for the recovery and preservation of any artifacts from the site.


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OCEAN SHORES, Wash. – The powerful wind storm that ravaged the Washington coast left a pleasant surprise behind.

The storm sent wind and seas over a state park near Ocean Shores and exposed a piece of maritime history – the wreck of a once-proud cruise ship.

As a fresh layer of giant driftwood lies tossed like twigs over the old road, a relic from the past is emerging from its tomb.

It's the wreck of the cruise ship Catala, and for the first time in decades, you can make out her rotting hull, the lines of her deck, and her port holes.

She's like a fossilized creature making a comeback, and she's worth a closer look.

Park ranger Jim Schmidt calls the resurfacing of the Catala an unexpected remnant of last weekend's big wind storm.

But the storm did more than just blow the dust off the old wreck, it didn't just change the shape of Damon Point, it moved it.

It was also a storm that ran the Catala aground back in the 1960s. She had been brought to Ocean Shores as a floating hotel for the World's Fair, and subsequent storms entombed her in the beach.

The Catala has become our own little ghost ship that comes and sails in and out of view with the most powerful of our winter storms.

It wasn't just high winds that whipped the sands of Damon Point Park, rangers say the seas themselves swept over it scouring out channels and exposing the ship.

Affiliation gives Maritime Museum access to vast collections, exhibits

MANITOWOC — The Wisconsin Maritime Museum will bring the nation's artifacts to the Lakeshore area.

The museum has become the first and, at the moment, only Smithsonian Institution affiliate in Wisconsin.

"This museum has reached the ultimate goal," Executive Director Norma Bishop said.

As an affiliate institution, the museum will have access to the Smithsonian's treasures.

"It is a long way from the day the submarine was towed here in 1970," Bishop said.

The WMM will celebrate the honor by hosting Smithsonian Affiliations Director Harold Closter at its annual meeting Saturday. His presentation will mark the official designation as a Smithsonian affiliate.

"It's important to us, because we want to share the collections of the American people with them in their own community … because not everyone can come to Washington," Closter said in a phone interview from Washington D.C. on Wednesday. "We need strong partners in an established museum."

The WMM is working to bring a Smithsonian exhibit to the facility within 18 months. It will work to develop education programs to support the exhibit, present it in its context, and incorporate an interactive component, Bishop said.

According to Closter, the WMM demonstrated:

. it has an appropriate non-profit facility;

. it has a mission and commitment to public service and education;

. it has a professional staff; and

. it has facilities that can assure the safety of Smithsonian artifacts.

Bishop said the museum staff began a detailed application process in summer 2005, and received notification of the designation in the fall. The WMM already is accredited with the American Association of Museums.

"The Smithsonian is like another echelon. Not every accredited museum will become a Smithsonian," Bishop said.

Bishop compares the accomplishment to earning the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

"It tells people that supporting this museum is a good investment," she said.


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