By DIVE Staff
A shipwreck dating back to the fifth or sixth century BC found off the coast of Sicily has provided evidence of trade between Sicily and ancient Greece.
Buried by sand and rocks at a depth of six metres in the waters of Santa Maria del Focallo towards the southeastern tip of Sicily, the wreck was first reported to the Italian Soprintendenza del Mare (Sopmare) in 2022 and mapped by divers from the Palermo-based BCsicilia, an association of volunteers dedicated to the protection of Sicily’s cultural heritage.
The subsequent excavation was conducted in September by archaeologists from the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the Università degli Studi di Udine in association with SopMare, with additional support from the Messina Coast Guard Diving Unit and the Port Authority of Pozzallo.
The excavation revealed the boat’s hull was built ‘on-the-shell’, a boat-building technique also known as ‘shell-first’, in which the hull is constructed using shaped planks of wood and then the supporting internal frame is added afterwards.
Several anchors were found close to the wreck, including two iron ‘T’-shaped (or fluked) anchors which probably dated to the much later seventh century AD, and four lithic (stone) anchors which would have been contemporary with the date of the shipwreck.
This research was carried out as part of the ‘Kaukana Project’, an initiative created in 2017 to reconstruct the coastal landscape and submerged archaeology along the Sicilian coast between Ispica, Kaukana and Kamarina.
The latest discovery adds another piece to the maritime history of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations. At the time from which the wreck is believed to have dated, Sicily was largely under Greek control but engaged in a centuries-long fight for dominance with the Carthaginian civilisation, which at times lay claim to almost half of the island.
Parts of Sicily were also still populated by outposts of the previous Phoenician inhabitants.
‘This discovery represents an extraordinary contribution to the knowledge of the maritime history of Sicily and the Mediterranean and highlights once again the central role of the Island in the traffic and cultural exchanges of antiquity,’ said Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, SopMare Councillor for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity.
‘The wreck, dating back to a crucial period for the transition between archaic and classical Greece, is a precious piece of the submerged Sicilian cultural heritage.’
Massimo Capulli, professor of underwater and naval archaeology at the University of Udine, and one of the leading members of the Kaukana Project, said that the wreck ‘belongs to a page of history in which the transition from archaic to classical Greece took place.
‘We are in fact faced with material evidence of the traffic and trade of a very ancient era,’ said Capulli, ‘when Greeks and Carthaginians fought over control of the seas, centuries before Rome forcefully appeared on the Mediterranean.’
