The Excavation

The Smothers-Bruni expedition to Pabuç Burnu excavated at the site from June through October in 2002 and again in June and July in 2003. Due to the proximity of the site to Bodrum, INA's headquarters served as an excavation base. The majority of the team resided and dined in the Center’s dormitory, and the Nixon Griffis Conservation Laboratory served as the temporary storage depot for all recovered artifacts. There, during evenings and non-diving days, we catalogued and photographed all artifacts before ultimately transferring them to the Bodrum Museum for conservation and permanent storage. Each morning, the team drove to Içmeler harbor where our excavation vessels––RV Virazon, the two-person submersible Carolyn, and its tender Millawanda––were docked. From there the team boarded Virazon and made the 45-minute trip southeast past Kara Ada to Pabuç Burnu, a small, forked headland covered with maquis scrub brush. We established a permanent mooring over the site to hold Virazon against the prevailing northwesterly meltem winds and the occasional southerly lodos.

The seabed at the site, off the western side of the point, begins at a depth of approximately 30 meters and quickly drops down several rock outcroppings to a depth of 40 meters. From there the deep sand of the seafloor falls away at about a 25-degree slope. Some wreck material was scattered down the rocks, nestled within crevices and beneath overhangs, but the vast majority lay strewn across the sand below, covering a large area measuring almost 26 meters north-south by 14 meters east-west.

Virazon served as our excavation/diving platform, housing our recompression chamber, air compressors, diving gear and excavation equipment, and computer facilities. In 2003, a rented diesel-powered road compressor, situated on the rocks of Pabuç Burnu, powered the underwater airlifts.

The team prepared the site for excavation and mapping by installing the underwater “telephone booth” and safety tanks, assembling and floating airlift pipes, locating datum towers at strategic positions, and erecting a nylon rope grid demarking rows of 2X2-meter squares across the excavation area. Precise relative locations of the datum points––the basis for all subsequent mapping––were established with measuring tape and the Site Surveyor™ program. Thereafter, artifacts were mapped using digital photography and PhotoModeler Pro™, a program that renders three-dimensional coordinates for points using photogrammetry.

All diving operations were conducted from Virazon’s forward deck. Each excavating team member made two dives a day; one in the morning and one in the afternoon, allowing for the requisite surface interval for proper off-gassing. Each dive to the wreck ended with a decompression stop at 6 meters, during which the divers breathed oxygen supplied from Virazon. On Virazon’s small stern deck, we registered the day’s artifacts and emptied and sieved the sediment from any intact vessel in search of clues to its original contents.

At the end of each field season, all intact artifacts were transferred to the Bodrum Museum to complete their desalination and undergo conservation. The hull planks and partial amphoras remain in the Nixon Griffis laboratory, where they have been desalinated and cleaned and are being studied. The hull wood is currently undergoing conservation with polyethylene glycol (PEG) in the new treatment tank and system designed by Robin Piercy.

Click here to see more pictures of the site and surrounding area