Under the Mediterranean: The Marsala Punic Ship and Honor Frost Foundation Scholars

This session from the 2017 Honor Frost Foundation Conference on Mediterranean Maritime Archaeology, chaired by Lucy Blue, presents three papers on Honor Frost and the Marsala Punic shipwreck in Sicily and one paper by recipients of the foundation's scholarships.

In the first paper, written by Pietro Alagna and read by Claire Calcagno and Elena Flavia, Alagna recounts the discovery and conservation of the Punic ship off Isola Grande near Marsala. After dredger captain Diego Bonini brought up ancient timbers in 1969, Gerhard Kapitän invited Frost to Motya, and the Punic vessel was found in August 1971. Alagna describes providing his villa at Santa Venera for the project's base and building stainless steel vats for desalination and conservation. Following the instructions of Michael Katzev from the Kyrenia shipwreck project, the team treated the wood with polyethylene glycol over three years before the hull was installed in the Baglio Anselmi in Marsala.

The second paper, by Rossella Giglio and read in English by Giulia Boetto, pairs personal memories of Frost with the history of the Marsala shipwreck exhibition. Giglio recalls the reconstructed 35-meter warship, connected to the 241 BC naval battle off the Aegadi Islands that ended the First Punic War, its lead-sheeted planking, and the Phoenician and Punic letters engraved and painted on the hull frames to guide assembly. She also notes recent finds of ship rams with Latin and Punic inscriptions from Levanzo, and traces the Baglio Anselmi Museum from 1986 through the 1999 air-conditioning installation and the 2017 renovation.

Claire Calcagno and Elena Flavia then present their discovery in March 2013 of an unpublished book manuscript by Frost titled "The Second Life of a Phoenix" in the Honor Frost archive in London. The binder holds seven drafted chapters of 139 typed pages covering the Marsala project from 1969 to 1973, along with outlines for later chapters and an early 1980s Italian translation of the first chapter. The speakers note that the polyethylene glycol used to treat the Marsala timbers was recycled directly from Katzev's conservation of the Kyrenia ship in Cyprus and later sent on to Bodrum, and describe their oral history interviews with local participants in Marsala.

In the final paper, Nassim Raad and Ziad Morsi, speaking also for Crystal El Safadi, Lucy Semaan, and Dorothy Chakra, outline the work of Honor Frost Foundation scholars from Lebanon and Egypt at the University of Southampton. They summarize graduate research on Bronze and Iron Age Levantine harbors, Lebanese maritime heritage law, the Roman economy and amphorae in the Near East, and traditional Nile sailboats, alongside underwater fieldwork at Anfeh and Alexandria.