Under the Mediterranean: Shipwrecks of Akko, Naples, Ma'agan Mikhael, Rhodes and Ragusa

This recording from the October 2017 Honor Frost Foundation Conference on Mediterranean Maritime Archaeology contains five papers on ship construction and shipwreck excavations across the Mediterranean.

Deborah Cvikel of the University of Haifa opens with the Akko Tower shipwreck in northern Israel, excavated between 2012 and 2016. Once proposed as a British warship scuttled during Napoleon's siege of 1799, the vessel is shown by hull carpentry, Sicilian glazed tiles, and archaeometallurgical analysis of its brass spikes and iron deadeye fittings to be a merchant brig about 25 metres long, built in the French tradition during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Chiara Zazzaro presents a study co-authored with Giulia Boetto and Pierre Poveda on four vessels uncovered between 2013 and 2015 during metro construction in the ancient harbour of Naples. Two poorly preserved wrecks, Napoli E and H, date to the second century BC. Napoli F and G date to the second and early third centuries AD: Napoli F is a Western Mediterranean Roman Imperial sailing ship with extensive hull repairs, while Napoli G is an asymmetrical harbour lighter with a triangular transom that may have stood at the stern rather than the bow.

Deborah Cvikel returns with a paper co-authored with Avner Hillman on building and launching Ma'agan Mikhael II, a full-scale sailing replica of the c. 400 BC merchantman excavated off Israel in the late 1980s. She describes boiled pine planking, mortise-and-tenon joints, tetrahedral recesses for sewing the bow and stern, hand-forged copper nails, and the practical need to install frames from the sixth and seventh strakes upward to keep the archaeological hull shape.

George Koutsouflakis presents a paper co-authored with Eric Rieth on Rhodes shipwreck 4, a 30-to-35-metre Byzantine merchant ship of the mid-twelfth century excavated in the commercial port of Rhodes in 2008 and 2013. Carrying Günsenin III amphorae and a goat pelt filled with cheese, the frame-first vessel burned and sank at an angle, preserving its keel, keelson, sister keelsons, notched stringers, and movable transverse ceiling planks.

Irena Radić Rossi concludes with a report co-authored with José Casabán on the Santo Hieronimo, a Ragusan nave owned by the De Primi family that sank in the Bay of Suđurađ near Dubrovnik in 1576. Renewed work in 2014 and 2015 recorded a rabbited stem, cant frames, port-side planking, rigging blocks, and large sheets of lead hull sheathing up to 2.29 metres long.