The most recent excavation carried out by a team of expert divers and marine archeologists, has unearthed more than fifty new historic objects from the legendary Artkitheyra shipwreck. The shipwreck yielded a fully intact amphora, some anchor stocks, a lead salvage ring, and plenty of other large and small historic articles.
The latest excavation of the wreck commenced in August this year, and continued till mid-September scoring the largest number of dives in a short period of time. It was the first time that the excavation was carried out purely on scientific basis with the aid from sophisticated marine research equipment and modern scanning tools. The ten-man team went as deep as 180 feet (55-meters) performing a whopping 61 dives in less than a two weeks period.
The latest project is a set of multiple expeditions to gather as much information as possible along with some more relics. The shipwreck has tons of hidden treasures that inform about the lifestyle of the elite at the time and also the level of knowledge mankind had almost a century before Christ. (Mail Online)
The shipwreck undergoing the excavation is famous for arguably the most significant marine discovery of the recent times, the ‘Antikythera Mechanism’. Recovered in 1900 from the ancient shipwreck off the Coast of Greek Island Antikythera, this mechanism of antiquity resembled a computing device that could predict the planetary movements as well as eclipses. Safely guarded in a small wooden box, the ‘Antikythera mechanism’ consisted of bronze dials, cogs and gears. The subsequent excavations yielded a further 81 fragments of the mechanism that included a total of 40 hand-made bronze gears.
The discovery of the Antikythera solidified previously held notion by some scholars that there were some highly sophisticated systems used by certain ancient cultures. The Antikythera has Greek Zodiacs and Egyptian calendar at the front, while at the back there are two dials predicting the lunar cycles and eclipses. The device’s scope of sophistication was uncanny; it took the humanity another millennium and a half to come up with anything remotely resembling the Antikythera mechanism. The device could precisely track the movement of almost all the major planets in all solar system, and could predict the position of the sun along with various phases and location of earth’s only satellite at the time, the moon.