Titan Wreck
About
A flat-bottomed trader of 20 to 25 meters sank east of the Ile du Levant around 50 BCE with some 700 Dressel 12 amphorae of fish sauce from Baetica in its hold. A fisherman found it in 1952 while working a diving bell. Philippe Tailliez led France's second underwater archaeological excavation here in 1957, a 62-day campaign.
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
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 →