N/A (open sea)
About
Deep-sea survey in the Strait of Sicily located Wreck B eighty kilometers northwest of Sicily at a depth of roughly eight hundred meters, undisturbed since it sank in the last quarter of the first century CE. Its amphorae came from four different origins on one voyage — Campania, Egypt, Crete, and Tripolitania — showing a single ship loading cargo across multiple ports. The 1988-97 survey that found it used deep-submergence technology more commonly associated with Titanic research to map the largest concentration of ancient shipwrecks ever found at such depth. The wreck proves Roman captains sailed the open central Mediterranean directly rather than always hugging the 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
Nearby
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 →