Maroni-Tsaroukkas: the anchorage re-survey (Atkins and Manning)

Between 2017 and 2019, divers re-surveying the seabed off Maroni-Tsaroukkas recorded 41 stone anchors, 11 stone blocks and 270 ceramic sherds, against 35 anchors found in 1995–96; the authors treat these figures as minima, since sand buries and exposes material from year to year¹. Carrie E. Atkins and Sturt W. Manning directed the work under the aegis of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project, with permission from the Department of Antiquities¹. They aimed to determine the extent of the anchorage and to develop low-cost three-dimensional recording¹.

The seabed was divided into a grid of 25 x 50 m quadrants covering about 225 x 200 m. Divers measured artefact positions along five temporary lanes in each quadrant, and a camera on a recreational dive scooter, triggered every second, supplied images for photogrammetry¹. The eastern part (Quadrants 1–16) was surveyed in June 2017 and the western part (Quadrants 17–32) in June 2018. In 2019, after winter storms had moved sand, Quadrants 1–8 were surveyed again and Quadrants 51–54 were added to the east¹. In the east lay the 11 calcarenite blocks, 80 to 190 m from the coast, with estimated masses averaging 357 kg¹. In the west, seven unfinished anchors lay 45 to 118 m from the coast, and a second Late Cypriot IA assemblage of over 100 sherds, found in 2018, lay 30 to 40 m from the 1995–96 assemblage of 75 sherds¹.

Atkins and Manning conclude that the east likely functioned as an active anchorage and that the west was probably terrestrial in the Late Bronze Age and later eroded and submerged. They read the unfinished anchors as some of the only evidence in the Mediterranean for anchor production, and judge the blocks likely cargo, either imported or sourced locally for export¹. Knapp and Meyer, citing the re-survey, write of a minimum of 70 anchors and 6 Canaanite jars². The 11 blocks remain on the seabed; only diagnostic sherds from the west were raised, and where they are stored is not recorded¹. The main report appeared in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology 41 in 2022, and Atkins's study of the ceramics and anchors appeared the same year in Manning's edited volume^1,3.