Pabuç Burnu Shipwreck
Excavated by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in 2002 and 2003, the early 6th-century BCE ship that sank in southwest Turkey at Pabuç Burnu (southeast of Bodrum, ancient Halicarnassus) offers evidence for developing systems of production and exchange in the Archaic period. The circulation of agricultural products in a modest merchant vessel—laced with ligatures and carrying a load of perhaps six tons—offers a glimpse at a practice of local transport designed to operate in a rather different framework from the exchange of luxury items catalogued by early Greek lyric poets or the markets of Classical Athens. The lab’s research on the shipwreck, led by our partner at Brock University (Canada), is concerned with the galley wares and cargo ceramics, including digital, computational, and petrographic analyses of the amphoras, with an eye toward broader questions about the vessel’s socioeconomic networks.
