Roman wreck off Antikythera keeps giving
Divers with the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece keep making new discoveries as the ship’s cargo has scattered far and wide, and there are findings from other wrecks in the area as well. [Guillaume Champain/ESAG-UNIGE
Archaeologists investigating the wreck of a Roman cargo ship off the coast of Antikythera, southeast of the Peloponnese, made several interesting finds during May-June underwater excavations that had not been expected to yield much excitement, but to be of a more technical nature.
According to the Culture Ministry on Friday, the discovery of fragments of statues strengthens the hypothesis that the Antikythera Mechanism was built by the ancient Greeks, while old human bones – a rare discovery – are expected to yield more information about the people traveling on the ship.
Early Byzantine pottery fragments found at the site, moreover, suggest that more ships with valuable cargoes went down in the area.
