INTRODUCTION
The Roman emperor Augustus claimed to have found Rome a city
of brick and left it a city of marble. Indeed, the remains
of more than a dozen stone cargoes in the shallow waters off
Italy, France, and Spain attest to the Roman appetite for
specialty stones white marble from Greece and Asia Minor;
yellow marble from Numidia; red and gray granite from Egypt.
The vast majority of these cargoes,
however, have not been treated as coherent archaeological
sites; instead they are only superficially explored, their
stones partly or wholly salvaged. As a result,
archaeologists know regrettably little about the
construction and lading of ancient stone carriers, which
must represent some of the most sophisticated technological
achievements of the ancient world.
Since 2005, an international team of archaeologists, staff
members of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, and
graduate students from the Nautical Archaeology Program at
Texas A&M University have been pursuing the excavation of a
Roman stone carrier wrecked off the Aegean coast of Turkey
southwest of Izmir at Kızılburun ("Crimson Cape"). This ship
was transporting all the elements of a monumental marble
column, in the form of eight individual drums and a single
Doric capital. INA president Donny Hamilton serves as the
project director, and assistant professor at Texas A&M
University Deborah Carlson as the teams archaeological
director. The Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism was
represented at Kızılburun by Ilker Tepeköy in 2005, Sinem
Özongan in 2006, and Gülnaz Savran in 2007.
This site was last updated on February 8, 2008 by Deborah
Carlson (dnc@tamu.edu)
