La Roche Fouras Wreck
About
A small 10-meter coastal trader wrecked off Cap Camarat near Saint-Tropez around 110 BCE, its hold packed with Dressel 1C wine amphorae. Only a compact 6 by 2 meter patch of hull survived, lashed together in the mortise-and-tenon style typical of Republican-era shipbuilding. It represents the modest coastal traffic that fed wine along the Provencal coast.
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 →