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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the archaeological-treasure dept.

After three field seasons, the Black Sea Maritime Archaeological Project is drawing to a close, but the things the team has discovered on the sea floor will keep researchers busy for a generation. Over the course of the expedition, researchers found 60 incredibly well-preserved ships from the medieval, Roman, Byzantine and ancient Greek eras, which are rewriting what historians know about ancient trade and shipbuilding reports Damien Sharkov at Newsweek.

The project, begun in 2015, wasn't originally about finding ancient ships. According to a press release, the team set out to use remote operated vehicles laser scanners to map the floor of the Black Sea off Bulgaria to learn more about the changing environment of the region and fluctuations in sea level since the last glacier cycle. But they couldn't help but locate ships too. Last year, they found 44 ancient vessels during their survey representing 2,500 years of history. "The wrecks are a complete bonus, but a fascinating discovery, found during the course of our extensive geophysical surveys," Jon Adams, principle investigator and director of the University of Southampton's Centre for Maritime Archaeology, said at the time.

During the latest field season, which just ended, the expedition discovered another batch of ancient ships. "Black Sea MAP now draws towards the end of its third season, acquiring more than 1300km of survey so far, recovering another 100m of sediment core samples and discovering over 20 new wreck sites, some dating to the Byzantine, Roman and Hellenistic periods," Adams tells Aristos Georgiou at The International Business Times. "This assemblage must comprise one of the finest underwater museums of ships and seafaring in the world."

St. Julien Perlmutter is all over this. The finds are even more exciting than the nautical knowledge to be gained, because many of the ships' cargos are intact.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:02PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:02PM (#573254)

    In all seriousness, are you mentally challenged?

    The only one suggesting this retarded idea of sailing from Ancient Greece through the Black Sea through to North America is you.

    The Ancient Greeks sailed from Ancient Greece to the Black Sea through the Bosphorus.

    The Ancient Greeks also sailed from Ancient Greece through the Mediterranean Sea, through the Strait of Gibraltar, on to the Caribbean and the Americas.

    Only some of their ships ended up at the bottom of the Black Sea.

    I hope that Slashdot comes back online soon, so fucking retards like you can go back to shitting up that site instead of this one!

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @07:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @07:58PM (#573451)

    OK, is it theoretically possible that, in the best of seasons, with the help of friendly currents and mild weather, a well-equipped and well-supplied greek vessel might have been able to cross the Atlantic?

    Uh, sure. But it would have been a complete fluke. Standard practice, as near as it can be reconstructed from ancient writings on the topic, was to either stay coastal, and run for the beach in the event of bad conditions, or to take brief runs across the sea where they knew land was on the other end. How good was their oceanic navigation? Not that great. They achieved some astonishing things, but they were not as good in the classical era as even mediaeval arabic navigators. They couldn't hold a candle, as far as we know, to the polynesian migrants.

    How about their ship construction? Their vessels were more fragile and less seaworthy than the longships of the vikings, and so were their rigs. For example, the lateen rig is a relatively low stress rig, but the long narrow spar that shapes the head of the sail is notorious for breaking, near-crippling the vessel.

    If they had had the wherewithal to go, and return, with any frequency greater than sheer insane chance, they would have opened the americas millenia before Columbus, or the romans would have (because the romans were good engineers and cheerfully used, adapted and improved everything they could get from the greeks).

    But they didn't.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @01:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @01:43PM (#573789)

    I think this discovery supports the Ancient-Greeks-in-the-Americas hypothesis only insofar it supports the hypothesis that ancient greeks ever sailed the seas and seemed to arrive at places that were a respectable distance away. I don't recall any concrete evidence for the latter but I always thought this was already known/accepted. There are all sorts of myths but you can hardly call those concrete evidence I guess.