Gallia Narbonensis
About
The Chretienne H wreck sank off the Golfe-Juan coast around 15-20 CE carrying Pascual 1 amphorae, a distinctive wine-jar type produced in Hispania Tarraconensis in northeastern Spain. Its cargo forms part of a documented pattern of Augustan-era wrecks tracing Tarraconensian wine into Gallia Narbonensis just as Rome was consolidating its hold on southern Gaul. The reef here, La Chretienne, has claimed enough ships across the centuries that archaeologists now catalog its wrecks by letter. It captures Spanish wine displacing Italian exports along the French Riviera trade routes within a generation of Augustus's death.
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
Nearby
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