The text of this page first appeared in INA Newsletter, 2.1 (1975): 1-4 as
 "The Porticello Shipwreck" by Cynthia Jones Eiseman
Edited for online publication January 2003

Like the Byzantine ship at Yassi Ada (INA Newsletter Vol. 1, No.2) the Porticello shipwreck was excavated by INA staff members while still working for the University Museum. The wreck, located on the Italian side of the Straits of Messina, near the village of Porticello, was discovered by a local Italian fisherman and heavily plundered by him and diving associates in the Fall of 1969.  Because of a dispute among the looters, the wreck's existence was brought to the attention of the local antiquities authorities.  Dott. Giuseppe Foti, superintendent of antiquities in Calabria, Italy, sought the aid of Franco Colosimo, a Sicilian diver who had assisted in the excavation of other ancient wrecks in Italian waters, and a group of specially trained divers of the Italian state police.  They mapped the site and recovered remains still visible on the seabed.

It was at Colosimo's suggestion that Dott. Foti subsequently invited the University Museum to undertake a salvage excavation.  This took place in July, 1970, under the direction of David I. Owen, with support from the University Museum and the Geographical Society of Philadelphia. Dr. Owen asked then-INA Executive Director Cynthia J. Eiseman to prepare the final excavation report, which subsequently appeared as her doctoral thesis for the Department of Classical Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania.  In INA Newsletter, Mrs. Eiseman provided for INA members this interim report on her research.

Figure 1.  Life-size bronze head.                                           D. Frey.

The Cargo

Nautical archaeologists are especially fortunate to have discovered and excavated a considerable number of wrecks of the Roman period.  Well-preserved Byzantine wrecks from Yassi Ada, Pantano Longarini, and Marzamemi have substantially supplemented our knowledge of Byzantine shipping from literary sources, and the Cape Gelidonya shipwreck has provided exciting new evidence for mechanisms of trade in the Bronze Age.  The Kyrenia ship contains unparalleled information about ship construction techniques and maritime trade practices at the beginning of the Hellenistic period.  Only the Porticello wreck has yet been found from the 5^th century B.C., when Greece was at her political, economic, and artistic acme.  It is unfortunate that the ship was so heavily plundered that we have little idea of the cargo's lading (which might have told us the course of her last voyage), the proportion of the four amphora types to one another within the cargo, and their relationship to the remainder of the cargo.  Also missing are large portions of two life-sized bronze statues that were part of the cargo.  Nevertheless, the scraps the looters left behind can contribute significantly to our knowledge of maritime trade, art history, and technology of the 5^th century.  

Unquestionably the most exciting object from the wreck is the bronze bearded head (Fig. 1).  From black glaze bowls and lamps recovered from the stern of the ship, we can fix the time of the ship's sinking to the last quarter of the 5^th century.  The bronze head must, then, have been made no later than some time late in the 5^th century, although some scholars, seeing the sculpture out of its archaeological context, would have placed it in the 4^th century.  With its prominent forehead, small, deep-set eyes, hooked nose, balding pate, moustache completely concealing the mouth, and massive beard, the head is unique among other monumental (that is, life-sized or larger) sculptural remains of the period, in which facial features are smooth and idealized, beards are short, and baldness is almost unknown.  What does this tell us about our understanding of Greek sculpture at this time?  Simply that, although modern scholars have made careful studies of the statuary which survives to this day, these are only a tiny proportion of what was made in antiquity, and our understanding of late 5^th century Greek sculpture is correspondingly small.

This comes as no surprise, for the most prolific ancient writers on Greek art, Pausanias and Pliny, tell us that in the 5^th century the predominant medium of sculpture was bronze.  And while several hundred marble and limestone sculptured buildings and individual statues have survived to the present day, there is only a handful of monumental bronzes.  Because of the vigorous characterization of the Porticello head, we believe it is a portrait.  Although still in its infancy in the latter part of the 5^th century, portraiture successfully reproduced both physical features and personality traits of the individuals represented. Typically, imaginary portraits of long dead literary figures such as Homer were produced at this time, and it is possible that the Porticello head is such an imaginary portrait.

Sculpture formed only a small part of the cargo, which included in addition amphoras containing wine and possibly preserved fish, lead ingots perhaps from the famous lead and silver mines of Laurion near Athens, and-most unusual-ink.  The amphoras come from far-flung regions of the Mediterranean, as far east as the Bosphorus and as far west as the western extremity of Sicily.

We know that bronze sculptures were expensive items in antiquity as they are today.  Ink was likewise a costly commodity, as was the fine vintage wine of Mende, which was carried in some of the distinctive amphoras recovered from the ship (Fig. 2).  Thus the cargo represents a considerable cash investment for the merchant or merchants who provided financial backing for the voyage.  

Figure 2. Amphora from Mende.                                          J. Cook.

If they were travelling on the ship-and we have no way of knowing this now- they may have lost their lives as well as, their money, although this is unlikely, the ship having sunk so close to shore.

The Hull

INA's J. Richard Steffy, reconstructor of the Kyrenia ship, has examined photographs and drawings of the few small remains of the Porticello ship's hull, and has been able to make many valuable suggestions about its construction, based on comparisons with features of the better-preserved Kyrenia ship. The reader is reminded that the Kyrenia ship, excavated and restored under the direction of Michael L. Katzev, sank around 300 B.C., and radio-carbon dates indicate that the Porticello vessel was built some time in the 5^th century. It is, therefore, likely that the two ships were built by shipwrights separated by only one generation, as a man and his grandson. This is not to suggest that the ships were built in the same place-there is insufficient evidence to support such a claim-but rather to point out that close similarities between the two vessels are not at all surprising, considering the conservatism of the ship-building art.

Copper nails, used to fasten frames to pre-erected strakes, were distributed on the seabed at Porticello over an area some 82 feet long.  At Kyrenia, ship's nails were found in an area 60 feet in length, and that ship has been restored with an overall length of 47 feet.  Using the same proportions, which allows for an outward collapse of stem and stern posts, we conjecture that the Porticello ship was approximately 66 feet long.  

Figure 2. Hull Fragment.                                                       J.  Cook.	Figure 3.  Tenons.                                          J. Cook.

That the Porticello ship was built by the shell-first technique, using mortises and tenons, employed throughout the Mediterranean in antiquity, is evident from the single hull timber recovered (Fig. 3), with a mortise cut into either edge, and from three tenons (Fig. 4).  The hull timber can be reconstructed to a thickness of 6.5 to 7 cm., thicker than the Kyrenia ship planking but not as thick as the Kyrenia ship wales.   Thus, although the timber's original function and location will forever remain a mystery, it is an important clue to the ship's construction method.  The mortises have tapered rather than straight edges, and are of different sizes.  It is possible that the piece comes from a scarf joint.  There is no evidence of wooden dowels or pegs transfixing the two mortises, but three tenons recovered from the wreck site do have dowel holes.  Once hull strakes had been edge-joined to one another with mortise and tenon joints, which were transfixed with dowels, the shipwright adzed frames and set them into the hull.  Strakes and frames were fastened to one another by drilling holes from the outside, inserting wooden treenails into the holes, and finally driving long copper nails through the treenails to assure a tight fit.  The ends of the nails were clenched over and their tips driven into the inner face of the frames.  Although no actual treenails are preserved, a number of nails were brought up with a heavy concretion surrounding their shafts (Fig. 5).  This concretion represents a partial corrosion of the nail, some of whose metallic elements permeated the wood of the treenail to form the concretion.  The same phenomenon was observed on Kyrenia ship nails.  

Figure 5.  Nails.                                           J. Cook.

Unclenched nails were recovered as well, and these may have been used to join the garboard or other lower strakes to keel or floors.  Where frames did not align exactly with the interior face of the strakes, the Kyrenia shipwright drove in wedge-shaped shims, and a shim from the Porticello wreck shows that her shipwright employed the same device.

The Porticello ship provides us with the earliest known examples of a number of features.  Several small pieces of lead sheeting indicate that small leaks in the hull were patched with this material (Fig. 6).  They further suggest that the hull was sheathed with lead on its outer face, for the Kyrenia ship used lead sheeting in both ways: outer hull sheathing was applied in long, broad sheets, and attached to the strakes with small nails creating a diagonal pattern; interior patches were small and rectangular, attached to the strakes only around the edges of the patch (as on Porticello), and used nails virtually identical to those on the Porticello wreck.  

Figure 6. Lead Patches.                                           D. Frey.

The 5^th century wreck has also produced the earliest example of a cleat (Fig. 7).  It is small (just over 8 inches [21 cm.] in length) but the principle of the cleat was evidently well understood at this time, for the rectangular hole for the bolt which fastened it down is tapered toward the bottom, providing resistance to the upward pull of the line which was wrapped around it.  

Figure 7. Wooden Cleat.                                     S.W. Katzev.

Perhaps one of the most exciting features of the Porticello ship's fittings is a wooden toggle (Fig. 8), for this small object alone gives us a clue to an important feature of the ship, its rigging.  Dick Steffy has studied seven wooden toggles recovered from the Kyrenia ship and has concluded that they were made on a lathe and varied in size and shape for identification purposes.  There were originally two sets of five on the Kyrenia ship, with each set designated for one edge of the ship's square sail.  They were used as a quick-release anti-luffing device when the ship was sailed into the wind.  Their function was demonstrated in sea trials of the scale model of the Kyrenia ship.  The Porticello toggle, also lathe made, is similar in size and general form to the Kyrenia examples, although it lacks decorative lathe-turned grooves.  Its presence on the 5^th-century vessel proves that she was a square-rigged ship, for such a device would have no place on a ship with fore-and-aft rigging.  

Figure 8. Wooden toggle,  and restored (below).                           D. Frey, S.W. Katzev.

Life at Sea

Life aboard ship probably changed little from the 5^th to the 4^th century.  Here again the Kyrenia ship is helpful in understanding the less well-preserved Porticello vessel. The larger ship may have required a bigger crew than the four who manned her smaller 4^th-century sister, but cooking and eating wares are not well enough preserved to provide clues. Only two fine, black glaze bowls were recovered, and we have no way of knowing how many more, if any, were carried.  In addition to these, a small wooden bowl, a terracotta mortar, a jug, a small cooking pot called a chytra, and two black glaze lamps are all that survive.  These were recovered from the northern extremity of the site and would have been kept in a small storage area below the after deck.  No trace of portable braziers common to Roman merchantmen were found, nor were any hearth and roof-tiles as on the Byzantine ship at Yassi Ada.  It is likely, therefore, that no galley existed, but rather hot meals were prepared ashore when the crew rested for the night.  The same procedure has been postulated for the Kyrenia ship, and galleys seem not to have been common until Roman times.

Also found in the stern storage area was a lead-tipped awl with a wooden handle (Fig. 9).  This little tool would have been used for mending sails, and it is not surprising that it was found in association with cooking and eating ware, for maintenance of sails must have taken place when the ship was at anchor.  Also from the ship's stern came the wooden toggle mentioned earlier, but it is not possible to say with any certainty whether this indicated that the ship was moving under sail when she sank, or whether the captain had struck the sail and stowed the gear before the ship came to grief.  

Figure 9. Awl with wooden handle (broken) and lead tip.                                                   J. Cook, D.Fry.

With the cooperation of Dr. Robert Brill of the Corning Museum of Glass, one of INA's Supporting Institutions, various types of metals from the site were analyzed, with the hope of identifying the sources of lead and determining the composition of copper and bronze.  Study of sculpture fragments supplemented our knowledge of bronze manufacturing techniques.  A new form of anchor, perhaps characteristic of the classical period, seems to have been used on both the Porticello and Kyrenia ships.

-Cynthia Jones Eiseman

Bibliography

Cynthia Jones Eiseman
2003, The Porticello Wreck: A 5^th Century B.C. Merchantman in Italy
Edited by Ralph K. Pedersen
URL, http://ina.tamu.edu/porticello/porticello.htm