Comacchio Wreck

About

A flat-bottomed river barge sank in the Po delta lagoon near Comacchio around 12 BCE, carrying 102 lead ingots weighing 3.1 tons, boxwood logs, and amphorae of wine and oil. Waterlogged mud preserved leather sandals, a soldier's kit, and a bronze statuette of Hercules and Nereus. Drainage workers struck the hull in 1980.

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

• https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/wreck-of-roman-ship-from-comacchio/
• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-021-01430-0
• https://www.ferraraterraeacqua.it/en/comacchio/discover-the-area/art-and-culture/museums-and-galleries/museum-of-the-roman-ship