Titan Wreck
About
A flat-bottomed trader of 20 to 25 meters sank in a rocky hollow off the Ile du Levant's Esquillade point around 50 BCE, its hold packed with roughly 700 amphorae — mostly Dressel 12 fish-sauce jars from Baetica mixed with Dressel 10s, one still holding almonds. A diver named Piroux spotted it in the 1950s at 28 meters depth. Philippe Tailliez led France's second underwater archaeological excavation here in 1957, a 62-day campaign now considered the first truly scientific shipwreck dig: divers mapped finds against a fixed grid and shot the first complete vertical photographic survey of a submerged site. The recovered cargo and hull timbers were brought up whole and are stored in Toulon.
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
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