Culip IV Wreck
About
A Roman trader sank in Cala Culip on Spain's Costa Brava around 75 CE, its hold loaded with fine red-gloss terra sigillata tableware made in southern Gaul. Excavators recovered a remarkable concentration of Drag. 24 cups and bowls, stamped by dozens of named Gaulish potters. The wreck sits among at least six other ancient ships lost in the same small bay near Cap de Creus, a graveyard carved out by the region's fierce Tramontane wind.
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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