FEBRUARY/MARCH 2001
ARCHAEOLOGIST EXAMINES ANCIENT VESSELS
Cheryl Ward, an FSU nautical archaeologist, is examining several of the world's most important ancient ships.
One is an almost intact 1,500-year-old wooden ship in the Black Sea. Another is a huge ship that sank in the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt 230 years ago. And another international attention-getter is one of the oldest planked boats in the world - a 75-foot-long boat discovered in Egypt as part of a funerary burial.
Ward is the principal investigator of four ancient shipwrecks discovered in September in the Black Sea as part of a project led by Robert Ballard - the explorer who located the Titanic. The National Geographic Society, which is sponsoring the Black Sea project, announced the discoveries in a news conference Nov. 2.
Ward, who joined the FSU faculty last fall as an assistant professor of anthropology, is studying the origins of the four shipwrecks in the Black Sea, including one almost perfectly preserved with its wooden mast and stanchions still standing about 1,000 feet below the sea.
"This is a ship carved by hand 1,500 years ago, so beautifully preserved it looks like it just got off the dock," Ward said. "We have never before had the chance to look at an ancient ship like this."
The deep waters of the Black Sea have a very low oxygen level, too low to support bacteria that would eat away organic material, such as wood.
The other shipwrecks in the Black Sea occurred between the 4th and the 6th centuries, Ward said, but they also will need further study to determine where they were coming from and where they were going. Photographic images from a robot scanning the sea floor, however, offer a glimpse of what the ships carried.
"What we see are piles of jars, which are like the tin cans of antiquity," she said. "They may have been used to hold olive oil or wine, but we won't know what's in them until we can do tests." Not only does a wrecked ship provide insight into a society's trade and commerce, it also provides the opportunity to look at every aspect of a culture, from its level of technological advancement to what the crew ate.
"Up until the Industrial Revolution, ships were the most complex objects that a society built," she said. "Everything those people needed to live had to be on the ship with them. So when we find shipwrecks, we get a perspective that is usually denied land sites."
While Ward focuses on shipwrecks, other scientists on the
expedition have found artifacts and a manmade feature that some
believe lends credence to the theory that the conversion of the
Black Sea from a fresh water lake to salt water may have been
the result of the biblical Noah's Flood. The theory is controversial,
and Ward, for one, doesn't buy it.
"Almost every society in the world has a flood myth that's
related to their creation, and efforts to link it to Noah's Flood,
don't have any scientific basis."
Ward is also working on tracing the origins of a huge ship that sank in the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt 230 years ago. Although it was filled with porcelain, coffee and incense from Asia, no one is able to say definitively where it came from.
In addition, she is studying the hull of a 5,000 year old wooden boat buried with an early pharoah long before the pyramids were built. - Jill Elish
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