Cavaliere
About
The Cavaliere wreck sank in the cove of Le Lavandou around 100-90 BCE with its oak hull sheathed in lead and its mast still standing on the seabed. Its hold mixed amphorae and black-gloss pottery with cuts of salted pork, plus coins from Numidia, Spain, and Massalia tracing the ship's trading circuit across the western Mediterranean. Excavators also raised seven bronze helmets of different styles, suggesting an armed escort rode along to guard the cargo. The wreck sank as Rome was actively Romanizing the Ligurian coast, two centuries before Trajan's empire reached its territorial height.
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.
Sources
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