Cap Bear 3 Wreck

ShipwreckGallia Narbonensis · Off Port-Vendres, FranceBuilt 100 BCE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

This 12 to 14 meter coastal trader went down south of Port-Vendres around 100-75 BCE loaded with Dressel 1B, Tarraconensis 1, and Pascual 1 wine amphorae, plus Dressel 12 fish-sauce jars — one still holding fish remains. Its hold also carried Roman bronze furniture, including couch fittings inlaid with silver and a bucket stamped with a Bacchic mask. A recent archaeometric study of the amphorae found the Dressel 1B and Dressel 12 vessels weren't Italian at all but local imitations, fired in workshops of Laietania in northeastern Hispania Citerior. The cargo captures the moment Spanish potters began copying Italian amphora shapes even as Spanish wine started challenging Italian imports on the Gallic market.

What happened here

A merchantman goes down with everything aboard and the sea keeps most of it. Cargo is usually amphorae — wine, oil, fish sauce — stacked in layers in sand, or roof tiles, or marble in the round, or ingots stamped with the smelter's name. Timbers survive where the mud or the cargo covers them, and the hull shows how it was built: planks edge-joined with mortise and tenon before the frames go in, a way of building that is slow, strong and about to be abandoned. Personal things come up too — a cooking pot, a lamp, coins that date the last voyage to within a few years. Most losses happen in autumn, close inshore, on a coast the crew knew.