The 1999 Expedition to the Georgian Black Sea Coast	The Black Sea with a close-up of the eastern coast, including some of the areas surveyed during the 1999 expedition.
Project Director: Dan Davis, INA Research Associate. Artifact Images Bibliography

In June of 1999, a team from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology traveled to Georgia at the invitation of PARK (Pipeline Archaeology for the Recovery of Knowledge) and the Center for Archaeological Studies (CAS) in Tbilisi. The primary goal was to collaborate with Georgian archaeologists about the potential of nautical archaeology along their Black Sea shores. In addition, the team attempted to substantiate reports of amphora mounds and ancient walls lying offshore and in a lake connected to the Black Sea by a narrow channel. What they found warrants a return.

Map showing the region of Poti and Lake Palaeostomi.

The eastern end of the Black Sea has enticed nautical travelers since time immemorial. According to the Argonautica (written in the third century BC), the territory of Colchis was terra incognita before the arrival of Jason and the Argonauts, who, lured by exotic tales, succeeded in stealing the fabled Golden Fleece and abducting the local king’s daughter, Medea. During their expansion into the Black Sea in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, Greek colonists followed in Jason’s mythical footsteps and set up permanent cities around its shores. Some went even as far afield as Colchis to set up a sizeable trading center at the mouth of the river Phasis (today known as the Rioni)—the very river that the Argo navigated to reach the kingdom of Aëtes. The settlement, also named Phasis, became a popular destination for Greek merchantmen from the Mediterranean during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods; according to ancient sources, the city continued its livelihood through seaborne trade well into the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. It had all the accouterments of a colonial Greek city, including a Temple of Apollo, a theater, and proper fortifications, all of which has yet to be found. At its wharves, ships onloaded cargoes of Colchian grain, metal and exotic materials in exchange for Greek wine, olives, and finely-made ceramics. These Greek goods made their way upstream along the numerous navigable rivers on the Colchian plain. Indeed a fifth-century BC Greek bowl made of silver (omphalos) was found far to the east, past the Aral Sea along the River Kuban. Eventually Roman, then Byzantine, armies arrived by sea to garrison the territory, preferring to chance a sea voyage from the Bosporus rather than march along the precipitous coastline of northern Asia Minor.

The June 1999 Survey

The outflow of the Rioni River (the ancient Phasis). Note how the silt-laden river water maintains its riverine shape far out to sea. The harbor at Poti lies in the background.

Given this level of seafaring activity, there is good reason to believe the great potential nautical archaeology holds in the region. In June of 1999, PARK brought together a team from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, led by Dan Davis (Project Director), and Professor Vakhtang Licheli of CAS. The aim of the joint team was to conduct an underwater survey near the modern port city of Poti, a town on the Black Sea coast whose name is etymologically related to Phasis. We attempted to corroborate the reports of local fishermen that amphoras and ancient foundation walls could be found off shore. Additionally, we were to investigate Lake Palaeostomi, whose western shoreline is separated from the Black Sea by a very narrow strand. As in antiquity, the two bodies of water are connected by a channel. According to Roman and Byzantine sources, this lake, as its name implies, was the ‘old mouth’ of the River Phasis. Its protected waters offered shelter for ships riding at anchor, and was used as a weigh station by merchant craft before heading upstream. The lake is very shallow today (5 meters maximum), the result of long-term siltation and Soviet hydraulic engineering. The Rioni River, which is still navigable for several kilometers, today flows into the Black Sea to the north of Poti.

The Black Sea

Kristin Romey and Bjørn Lovén aboard Irena, preparing for their drift dive.

With the help of a hired Russian boat and boat-captain, we spent the first ten days of our survey conducting diver surveys offshore in waters 10 to 30 meters deep. Currents and visibility were suitable, but not ideal. The general current in the Black Sea is a counter-clockwise one, and runs like a river around the shores of the Black Sea basin. Its erratic onshore/offshore movement baffled us: on some days we dived with no current at all, while on others it picked up to one or two knots. Sometimes it even changed abruptly in the middle of a dive. To save energy we turned compass swims into drift dives and covered even more area. Conditions of visibility, to a certain extent, limited our effectiveness at scanning the bottom. We sensed before our arrival that visibility would be poor, being so near to a large river delta. But in fact it was better than expected, ranging between 2 and 5 meters. During a drift dive near the modern port facility at Poti, two of our divers, Bjørn Lovén and Charles Pochin, were combing the bottom at 20 meters when they drifted beneath the southern outflow of the Rioni and were left completely in the dark. The silt-laden freshwater of the river had eclipsed all sunlight, an effect due to the tendency of rivers in this area to maintain their shape far out to sea.

Much to our disappointment, we were unable to verify the reports of ancient offshore sites during that time, despite covering acres of bottom. However, we were able to obtain a better grasp of eastern Black Sea diving conditions and bottom topography—two priceless pieces of information not easily found in western libraries. The nautical charts we obtained beforehand gave a general indication of the degree of slope, although they contained no information on bottom composition or protuberances. Close inshore we discovered deeply-gouged trawl scars cris-crossing the bottom; at some locales the clay bottom turned into hard berms one meter high and would certainly appear suggestive of a shipwreck on a side-scan sonar. With this in mind, we plan to return next year with the proper remote-sensing equipment.

Lake Palaeostomi, the ‘ancient mouth’

Charles Pochin, Alexander Licheli, Serge, Gela Gamkrelidze, and Bjørn Lovén, transiting from the Black Sea to Lake Palaeostomi.

So, with limited luck offshore, we decided to concentrate our efforts at key spots in the lake in the hope that we might find more evidence of Phasis, the Greco-Roman city. In 1985, Russian and Georgian divers found evidence of a settlement in several places around the shores of the lake, with ceramics ranging in date from the fifth century BC to the Late Byzantine Period. Along the west-central shore of the lake we immediately found a profusion of pottery sherds lying on a muddy bottom in very shallow water. We conducted a limited excavation here, digging test pits at regular intervals to a depth of one meter in order to gauge frequency, distribution, and provenance. In the end we registered over 1000 artifacts composed of ceramics, glass, wood, and one coin. The entire assemblage ranges in date from the fifth century BC to the Late Byzantine/Early Medieval period, thus affirming a similar diachronic distribution found by the Russian/Georgian survey of 1985. Ceramics of Colchian manufacture dominated the pottery record, with Sinopean, Crimean, and Rhodian sherds (mostly of amphora shapes) turning up in some quantity. Overall pottery shapes, however, provide a somewhat clearer picture as to the nature of the settlement, for both transport vessels and cooking wares were found together, thus suggesting strongly the presence of a settlement/trade center on the outskirts of Phasis. The coin contained only a partial Latin inscription on the reverse side; it was too eroded to date to any specific reign, although a Georgian numismatist dates it tentatively to the fourth century AD.

The ancient city/emporium of Phasis likely lies at the bottom or along the marshy shores of Lake Palaeostomi. A detailed geomorphological survey is required to understand better the wetland conditions and to construct likely scenarios of river-bed shifts through time. Of interest is the interruption of the slope directly offshore of Poti’s modern harbor. Here it appears that a deep chasm was cut into the bottom, undoubtedly by a river, in extremely ancient times. The key to Phasis’ discovery, we believe, lies in the geological history of the wandering mouth of the Rioni; once it is scientifically charted, a search of its ancient inland banks should reveal clues of the location of the Archaic and Classical city.

More pertinent for us would be the discovery of an ancient shipwreck in the eastern Black Sea. The excavation of a Bronze or Iron Age shipwreck would, in the opinion of several Georgian archaeologists, rewrite the region’s history. Therefore, we have tentatively planned an expedition for summer 2000. This time we will conduct remote sensing operations, followed by a diving investigation, in the area around Poti and the mouth of the lake’s channel. Plans are also afoot to survey the harbor at Batumi, a coastal city south of Poti (very near the Turkish border) whose ruins date to the fifth century BC. (Batumi is a corruption of the ancient Greek Bathus Limen, translated as ‘Deep Harbor.’) Nearby is the ancient site of Apsarus, now known as Gonio Castle, a well-preserved Roman castrum built in the third century.

We will keep you updated about the upcoming survey as information becomes available.

If you would like more information pertaining to this project or future INA/CAS projects in Georgia, please contact Dan Davis at: