Hull from the Pisa San Rossore ship graveyard · Wikimedia Commons

Portus Pisanus

Pisa San Rossore Ships

ShipwreckItalia (Regio VII Etruria) · Pisa, Tuscany, ItalyBuilt 100 BCE

About

Construction crews building a rail link at Pisa's San Rossore station struck a buried ship hull in 1998 and kept striking more for the next eighteen years, eventually uncovering thirty-nine vessels preserved in the silted-up channel of Pisa's ancient river harbor. The ships span roughly nine centuries of continuous use, from the second century BCE into the early medieval period, alongside ceramics, glass, rope, tools, and even human skeletons preserved by the waterlogged mud. Archaeologists nicknamed the site the 'Pompeii of the sea' for how completely the silt sealed in organic material that almost never survives elsewhere. The harbor was a working river port in continuous operation through the exact period this map depicts, though no single hull is dated precisely to the year 117 CE.

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.