Arch-Tech: Advancing Marine Archaeology

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The oceans and seas are the last great frontier for Near Eastern archaeology. Year after year, the Mediterranean Sea yields rich new data from prehistory to late antiquity: ports and harbors, maritime facilities, and shipwrecks that make global headlines, such as the 14th-century BCE Uluburun shipwreck and its precious cargo discovered in 1982 off the coast of Turkey.a These discoveries require scholars to employ a special set of tools and methodologies that characterize a specialized subfield—marine archaeology. Marine archaeology (also called nautical or underwater archaeology) is relatively young. It was pioneered in the second half of the 20th century by […]

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Footnotes

1. Eric H. Cline, “Littoral Truths,” Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 1999.

2. For discussions of some of this pioneering work, see Cemal Pulak, “Shipwreck!” Archaeology Odyssey, September/October 1999; and Shelley Wachsmann, “Milestones: George F. Bass (1932–2021),” BAR, Fall 2021.

3. For more on cyber-archaeology, see Thomas Levy et al., Cyber-Archaeology in the Holy Land: The Future of the Past (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013), available at barmag.org/cyber.

Endnotes

1. See Assaf Yasur-Landau et al., “Sea Level Changes and the Locations of the ‘Missing’ Hellenistic and Roman Harbours at Tel Dor, Israel,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 53.2 (2024), pp. 515–534; and Gilad Shtienberg et al., “Changing Environments and Human Interaction During the Pleistocene–Early Holocene from the Shal-low Coastal Area of Dor, Israel,” Quaternary Research 105 (2021), pp. 1–18.

2. Jessica L. Nitschke, S. Rebecca Martin, and Yiftah Shalev, “Between Carmel and the Sea. Tel Dor: The Late Periods,” Near Eastern Archaeology 74.3 (2011), pp. 132–154.