Spargi Wreck
About
The Spargi wreck sank around 120-100 BCE near La Maddalena with its thirty-five-meter oak hull sheathed in lead, carrying wine amphorae, pottery, and furniture. Excavators eventually recovered roughly 400 amphorae from the site, enough to reconstruct a full cross-section of the original hold now on permanent display in the local museum. One bronze helmet turned up still holding a skull, a grim hint the ship went down in a fight rather than a simple storm. The wreck marks a well-traveled corridor through the Strait of Bonifacio linking Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica generations before Trajan's Mediterranean.
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
.jpg?width=800)
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 →