This summer marks the 50th Anniversary of the first ever excavation of an ancient shipwreck on the seabed at Cape Gelidonya led by Dr. George F. Bass of INA – at the time a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania – in 1960. As this was the first shipwreck excavation directed by a diving archaeologist, Dr. Bass became known by such media outlets as the National Geographic Magazine as “the father of underwater archaeology.” To mark this 50th anniversary of the birth of modern shipwreck archaeology, the only four survivors of the original excavation team (Claude Duthuit of France, Waldemar Illing of Germany and Ann and George Bass of the United States) will be at the original site, at least in the first weeks of August, to celebrate. In addition, Claude Duthuit, Waldemar Illing and George Bass, now in their 70s are also expected to dive on the wreck, which is the shallowest they have worked on during the past 49 years since the original Cape Gelidonya excavation.

The reason for the return to Cape Gelidonya is for more than nostalgia, however. While excavating the nearby Uluburun shipwreck between 1984 and 1994 (like the original Cape Gelidonya excavation [May 1962], it was the subject of a National Geographic article [December 1987]), some of the excavation team, including Duthuit, Hirschfeld, Cemal Pulak, and George Bass, visited Cape Gelidonya several times to look at the site anew with equipment, such as a modern metal detector and underwater scooters, not available half a century earlier. This modern equipment, coupled with more experience, led the team in only days to find the first weapon from the ship (a bronze sword), the best-preserved pottery from the wreck (50 meters away, where the original team had discovered the rocky pinnacle that undoubtedly sank the ship around 1200 B.C.), and one of the ship’s stone anchors, about 100 meters from the area that was excavated in 1960; there were also new finds of bronzes and stone pan-balance weights. These new finds provided materials that could be sourced in a laboratory, and since both the stone of the anchor and the clay of the pottery came from Cyprus, Dr. Bass’ original published conclusion that the ship was Syrian in origin must be revised. In addition, new studies of the pan-balance weights and lead-isotope analyses of the ship’s copper ingots already provide enough material to lead to a new “final” publication of the site, which will be undertaken by Hirschfeld, Cemal Pulak, and Bass. In other words, before this new publication, the team would like to be as sure as possible that the site has been combed for other finds; Pulak, for example, points out that the bases of two huge jars, as big as the jars he raised at Uluburun, have been found but none of their joining fragments, which must be somewhere on the site, perhaps covered by concretion. So undoubtedly there remains a fair amount more to be located and raised and much more to be learned from this important site. Learn more about the Cape Gelidonya project and other INA research and expeditions at inadiscover.com.