2,500-year-old shipwreck and anchors discovered off the coast of Sicily

A shipwreck dating back to the 5th and 6th centuries BC has been discovered near Sicily as well as ancient anchors made of stone and iron, Italian officials said.

The 2,500-year-old wreck was found buried under sand and rocks by crews working on an underwater drilling project in the waters of Santa Maria del Focallo, near Espica at the southern tip of the Italian island. He said Sicily’s sea supervisor said in a statement on Monday.

When archaeologists discovered the sunken ship, they discovered a structure that had been built using the “shell-on-shell” construction technique, a simplified method of early shipbuilding often attributed to populations around the Mediterranean. The supervisor said they also found a set of anchors several feet from the wreckage. Two of the anchors were made of iron and likely dated back to the 7th century AD. The other four anchors, which were made of heavy stone, probably date back to the 7th century AD. Prehistoric era.

Archaeologists created a 3D model of the shipwreck and collected samples of the artifacts for analysis, hoping to understand more about the materials it is composed of.

Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, Regional Advisor for Cultural Heritage in Sicily, said: “This discovery represents an extraordinary contribution to knowledge of the maritime history of Sicily and the Mediterranean, and highlights once again the central role of the island in traffic and cultural exchange in antiquity.” And Sicilian identity, in a translated statement about the published shipwreck By the University of Udine. “Dating from a crucial period of transition between ancient and classical Greece, the wreck is a valuable piece of underwater Sicilian cultural heritage.”

The three-week excavation at Santa Maria del Focallo, which was part of the Cocana Project, an archaeological research initiative, ended in September, but officials did not share their findings until this week. The sea superintendent led the initiative with archaeologists from the University of Udine, near the excavation site.

Project participants say this wreck could shed light on an important chapter of ancient Greece, which occupied Sicily for hundreds of years until Rome captured the island around 200 BC.

massimo capoli, Cocana Project Coordinator The professor at the University of Udine added, in a separate statement issued by the university, that studying the wreck may help shed light on how trade occurred between the ancient Greeks and the Carthaginians, two groups that fought for thousands of years to control the seas in the present. Sicily.

“We are actually encountering physical evidence of traffic and trade in a very ancient era,” Kapolei said.