Fretum Gallicum

Sud-Lavezzi 2 Wreck

ShipwreckCorsica et Sardinia · Lavezzi Islands, Strait of Bonifacio, Corsica, FranceBuilt 10 CE · Destroyed 23 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

The Sud-Lavezzi 2 wreck sank in the Strait of Bonifacio between 22 and 25 CE hauling a genuinely mixed Baetican cargo: olive oil, wine, and fish sauce packed across at least six distinct amphora types, plus raw copper and lead ingots. That range of goods on one ship shows how thoroughly southern Spain's Guadalquivir valley had industrialized its exports by the early first century CE. The wreck sits in the same strait where the Spargi ship also went down, a genuine bottleneck for ancient Mediterranean shipping. It captures Baetica functioning as one of Rome's most productive single-province economies less than a century before Trajan's reign.

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.