Dramont A Wreck

ShipwreckGallia Narbonensis · Off Saint-Raphael, FranceBuilt 50 BCE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

Dramont A sank in the reef-strewn waters off Saint-Raphael around 50 BCE, one of more than ten wrecks charted in the Dramont anchorage alone. Diver Claude Santamaria discovered the site in 1956 and worked it until 1958; a 1959 campaign led by A. Sivirine of the French Underwater Research Office recovered much of the cargo and made the first study of the roughly 20-meter hull, with further excavation resuming in 1971-1974. The ship carried Italian wine amphorae alongside fine Campanian black-glazed tableware bound for Roman Gaul. Archaeologists label the Dramont wrecks alphabetically from A through J for the density of losses here, and by 117 CE this same stretch of coast had already claimed generations of merchant vessels making the run toward Massalia and Narbo.

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.