Cape Greco: Eastern Cyprus Maritime Survey

In 2007 the Eastern Cyprus Maritime Survey located the scattered ceramic remains of a Roman shipwreck off the southeast coast of Cyprus, in Fig Tree Bay, north of Cape Greco¹. The survey was sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, the RPM Nautical Foundation and the Thetis Foundation, and worked by permission of the Department of Antiquities^1,2. The annual notices name no director; Justin Leidwanger wrote its published studies^1,3.

Leidwanger describes the survey's aim as locating and documenting material evidence for long-term seaborne exchange, and says the wreck's cargo mix and its rarity among known Roman wrecks in Cypriot waters merited further work in 2008 and 2009³. The method was diving survey, with surface mapping, counts of diagnostic fragments and selective sampling of ceramics; the seabed was not probed or excavated^1,3. In 2008, over four weeks, the team established the limits of the wreck, mapped roughly half the visible remains and raised representative ceramic samples, which were redeposited after study^1,4. The notice for that year planned to complete the mapping and to search the deeper sandy seabed for better preserved wrecks with sonar, sub-bottom profiling and magnetometry⁴. A non-intrusive map of the surface remains was completed between mid-July and mid-August 2009².

The cargo lies in two areas in 4 to 9 m of water, and no wood, anchor or other ship fittings are visible on the surface^1,2,3. Leidwanger counted at least 133 transport amphorae of four types, led by 86 Agora M54 jars (64.7%)³. The 2009 notice puts the number at over 130, mostly from southeastern Asia Minor and the northeast Mediterranean, with a group that appears to have carried wine from the French Mediterranean coast². Resinous lining on some amphora bases is probably indicative of wine⁴. The reports date the wreck variously, from the first decades of the 2nd century AD (2009 notice) and the end of the 1st or early 2nd century (Leidwanger 2010) to broadly the later 2nd century (Leidwanger 2013)^1,2,3. Leidwanger reads it as a small shipment from the coast of Cilicia and northwest Syria bound for southern Cyprus, with a minor Gaulish component³.