Antikythera Wreck

The account

In the spring of 1900 a boatload of Greek sponge divers, sheltering from a storm behind the little island of Antikythera, dropped down to look for sponges and found instead a field of bronze arms and marble faces lying in the dark at forty meters. They had stumbled onto a Roman-era ship that sank around 60 BC, her hold packed with Greek statues and luxury goods being shipped, probably as plunder, toward Italy. The recovery that followed was the first great underwater excavation in history, and it raised masterpieces: the Antikythera Youth, a life-sized bronze of heartbreaking beauty, marble gods and horses, glass and jewelry.

And then there was the lump. Among the haul was an unremarkable corroded mass of bronze that sat in a museum drawer until someone noticed gear teeth in it. It turned out to be the Antikythera Mechanism, an intricate clockwork of more than thirty interlocking bronze gears that modeled the heavens, predicting the movements of the sun and moon and planets and the timing of eclipses years ahead. Nothing remotely as complex would appear again for over a thousand years. A shoebox-sized computer, two thousand years old, pulled from a shipwreck by accident.

That single object rewrote what we thought the ancient world could do, and it came from one ship, found by chance, only partly excavated.

Which is exactly why the wreck will not let archaeologists walk away. Modern expeditions keep going back, and they keep finding more, an arm here, a bronze there, and the surveys say whole statues are likely still buried under the sediment. The Antikythera wreck has already handed us the most astonishing artifact of antiquity, and it is not finished. The next corroded lump someone lifts off that seabed could be another machine the history books say should not exist.

Known intelligence

• A Roman-era ship sank around 60 BC off the island of Antikythera carrying looted Greek bronze and marble statues and luxury goods.
• Greek sponge divers found it in 1900; the recovery that followed is considered the birth of underwater archaeology.
• Among the finds was a corroded lump that proved to be the Antikythera Mechanism, a geared device that predicted the sun, moon, planets, and eclipses.
• The mechanism's technology was over a thousand years ahead of anything else known; recent surveys suggest more bronzes are still buried at the site.

Theories of the hunt

• More bronze masterpieces, perhaps whole statues, remain under the sand and await excavation.
• A second debris field or part of the cargo may lie deeper, beyond reach of early divers.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The site is a protected Greek state excavation; the live lead is the ongoing Return to Antikythera project, which since 2012 has remapped the wreck and recovered more.
• Surveys show statues and cargo still under the sediment and large boulders; the targets are the unexcavated areas of the main wreck and a possible second wreck nearby.
• The Antikythera Mechanism fragments are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, where X-ray CT and gear-model reconstruction work continues to decode it.
• Any work needs Greek permits and trained divers or ROVs; this is archaeology, not salvage.

The trail, in order

• c. 60 BC: the treasure ship sinks off Antikythera.
• 1900: sponge divers discover the wreck.
• 1901-1902: bronzes, marbles, and the mechanism are raised.
• 2012-present: new expeditions recover more and map unexcavated areas.

Sources and the record

• Antikythera wreck (Wikipedia)
• Antikythera shipwreck (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)