Sadana Island, Egypt - Image Gallery

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Lionfish at the Sadana Island safety stop.

This porcelain selection from the Sadana Island Shipwreck would have fetched a fortune on the market in the 18th century and today.

Up to 40 archaeologists suit up twice a day, six times a week in the equipment tent.

Archaeologists use this two-ton, steel platform to bridge the dangerous meeting between land and sea.

Clownfish at 100 feet.

Amphoras provide the necessary foundation for coral reef formation.

More than 100 feet beneath the sea, the Sadana ship lies beneath a protective layer of sand, marked by large storage jars for food. Their function was to keep rats and other vermin out of ship's stores.

A four-armed grapnel anchor is one of three that mark the ship's bow.

Just forward of midships, archaeologists work directly over the ship's keel.

Rider frames notched over close-set stringers that overlay futtocks also supported bulkheads in some parts of the hull.

In the stern, the hull measures more than 95cm thick in some areas.

View of a portion of the wreck as it sits on the seafloor. The round shapes are porcelain dishes 38 cm/17 in. in diameter.

At the stern, massive knees emerge from a bed of clay jars and sand.

The clay jars, "qulal" in Arabic, were shipped empty because they were intended only for cooling their owners' drinking water.

Archaeologists rely on measuring tapes and notebooks underwater just as on land.

We use a computer-based mapping system for pinpointing each artifact's precise location.

Our primary excavation tool is the water dredge, which sucks sand from the water above the seabed and dumps it far below the site.

Glass "case" bottles like this one from the wreck often carried liquor.

We've excavated the remains of aboiut 100 glass"case" bottles, usually intended to carry liquor.

This copper alloy embossed box is one of the few personal objects from the site and contained fragments of tobacco leaves when found.

More than two dozen of these clay pipe bowls probably belonged to the ship's crew.

Coffee was a major cargo on the Sadana ship. Popular 500 years ago and today, this stimulating beverage made up two-thirds of Egypt's foreign imports.

Stacks of coffee cups concreted together tell us they were packed as a mixed group.

Some of more than 200 coffee cups from Sadana Island.

Physical characteristics let us identify coffee beans, pepper, cardamom, and other spices as well as foodstuffs from the Mediterranean.

The dark bits of seeds and other plant remains are soft and waterlogged.

Team members used bucket floatation to recover plant remains including coffee, pepper, other spices, and foodstuffs.

Archaeologists must work carefully between ship timbers in the stern because the area once was filled with coconuts.More than 40 were recorded in 1996.

Chunks of aromatic resin, still sweet-smelling after nearly two and a half centuries beneath the sea, once were packed in the stern.

Organic preservation of rope and other materials is quite good.

Unfortunately, land excavations of looter's dumps were part of our 1996 season. More than 120 broken porcelain dishes and cups were recovered as we set up our tents.

Fragments of the ship brought to the surface are precisely recorded to bring the secrets of its construction to light.

Lara Piercy, artist, drawing one of the largest earthenware jars, known today as "qulal".

Cleaning, documenting, and mapping excavated artifacts occupy us between dives.

Teamwork triumphant.

After hours of recovery work, we learned this jar contained tiny seeds from cardamom and other spices.

Porcelain bowls like this example from Sadana Island originally featured scarlet and gold paint over the cobalt blue underglaze. This bowl's twin can be seen in the porcelain collection at the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul.

Artist Netia Piercy traced a barely visible design to produce this drawing of the bowl's original decoration.

Sea water eroded all but the underglaze cobalt design on this bowl.

An example of a vibrantly painted bowl from the Topkapi Sarayi Museum like one from the Sadana Island Shipwreck.

These blue and white porcelain bowls originally were overlaid with glowing patterns in green, scarlet, and gold illustrated in the drawing to the right.

A plate with its original pattern "ghosted" in pencil.

A drawing this plate's elaborate design, probably in gold, green and pink originally, from Sadana Island.

Undamaged examples of Chinese Imari porcelain abound at the Topkapi Sarayi Museum in Istanbul, once a palace of the Ottoman sultans and now home to one of the world's best collections of porcelain.