Dramont D Wreck
About
This 20-meter merchant ship sank at Dramont around 45 CE carrying a hold of Dressel 2-4 wine amphorae, the standard jar of the early Imperial wine trade. It rests among a cluster of wrecks piled on the same treacherous stretch of coast near Saint-Raphael. The Oxford Roman Economy Project catalogs it among thousands of wrecks charting Rome's seaborne wine trade.
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
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →