Bronze Hercules and Nereus statuette from the Comacchio wreck cargo, Museo Delta Antico · Wikimedia Commons

Comacchio Wreck

ShipwreckItalia · Valle Ponti near Comacchio, ItalyBuilt 12 BCE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

A flat-bottomed river barge, its hull about 21 meters long and 5.6 meters wide, sank in the Po delta lagoon near Comacchio around 12 BCE while ferrying 102 lead ingots weighing 3.1 tons, 28 boxwood logs, and amphorae of wine and oil. Waterlogged mud in the Valle Ponti lagoon preserved leather sandals, a soldier's kit, a wooden shovel, and a bronze statuette of Hercules wrestling the sea god Nereus. Drainage workers struck the hull in 1980; the Soprintendenza Archeologica excavated it fully between 1986 and 1989. Scholars nicknamed the find Fortuna Maris, and its timbers and cargo now fill Comacchio's Museo Delta Antico. In 117 CE the wreck itself lay already buried and forgotten beneath a century of silt.

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.