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Excavation

  • Torre Santa Sabina
  • Carovigno
  •  
  • Italy
  • Apulia
  • Province of Brindisi
  • Carovigno

Tools

Credits

  • The Italian Database is the result of a collaboration between:

    MIBAC (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali - Direzione Generale per i Beni Archeologici),

    ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione) and

    AIAC (Associazione Internazionale di Archeologia Classica).

  • AIAC_logo logo

Summary (English)

  • A number of wrecks lie on the seabed in the bay, one of which was excavated in 2007. Situated at 2.50 m in depth, a few metres from the shore, it was beached at a right angle to the shore and thus seems to represent an interesting marker of the variations in the sea level. The excavated portion, circa half the boat, showed the external planking, assembled using mortice and tenon joints, to which numerous planks of the internal frame and the robust stepped keel were fixed. The wreck was of great interest due to the presence of elements of the bridge, props, beams and planks, which are only preserved in exceptional cases (only one other case is known for antiquity, in France). Originally the boat must have been over 20 m long and been of a reasonable tonnage. On the basis of the pottery finds, including an intact African amphora and others of the same typology, fragmented but largely reconstructable, the wreck can be dated to the beginning of the 4th century A.D.

    The 2009 campaign continued the investigations at the foot of the western bank of rock, at the base of the submerged rocks, to a depth of 5 m, in the so-called area B. Here there was a deposit of material partially recovered between the 1970s and 80s (circa eleven thousand pieces), extremely homogeneous both in provenance and fabrication and above all chronology: from Mycenean pottery (LH III) to Late Roman C, from late antique to medieval pottery.

    The excavation investigated a limited but intact and densely stratified section of the submerged deposit. At least two layers were identified within the deposit, which although they were heavily disturbed by stormy seas, seemed to be in situ.
    The state of preservation and conditions of the deposition indicate that US 2 was a late Republican cargo, constituted by amphorae and perhaps bricks/tiles (saleable ballast?) of local production and containers, mostly for wine, from the Aegean area. These travelled with table and kitchen wares of oriental production, according to a commercial model of redistribution which had its hub in the great port of Brindisi. Furthermore, it is also necessary to mention three peculiarities which further support the identification of the deposit as the remains of a cargo: the overturned position of the finds; the high incidence in US 1 of cobbles that may be allocthonous, the presence noted in previous campaigns, of timber remains with traces of burning in the cobble layer. All of these elements suggest an upside down stratigraphy, that is an overturned cargo, with the ballast (the cobbles) which, originally spread on the bottom of the hold, now covering the cargo, and with the few remains of the hull, wrecked following a fire on board, overlying or mixed with the presumed ballast.

    This deposit is separated by a thin diaphragm US 3 from the layer below, different in composition and dating of the materials. US 4 is identifiable, for analogous reasons, with a much earlier cargo, of late archaic date.

    Therefore, over the centuries a number of boats came to be wrecked on this heavily exposed stretch of coast, and here several cargoes or parts of cargoes precipitated and dispersed along the rocky scarp. At the same point, probably caused by the effects of the sea’s movements, traces of the port’s unloading activity had come together, attested by materials that were isolated and mixed (“intrusions”) both in production and chronology.

    Lastly, fragments of impasto pottery dating to the middle Bronze Age were found at the base of US 4. These probably related to a prehistoric settlement that developed on this bay and that immediately to the north.

  • Rita Auriemma - Università degli Studi di Lecce, Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali 

Director

Team

  • Gianluigi Mancino - Università del Salento
  • Bruno Raffone - Università di Urbino

Research Body

  • Università del Salento, Dipartimento di Beni Culturali

Funding Body

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