Diving into History - The Latest Underwater Discoveries

The Latest Underwater Discoveries

In recent years, for-profit underwater salvors have captured the public imagination, garnering breathless headlines announcing their recovery of "treasure" ships. But there's much more to the world of nautical exploration than the giddy promise of gold coins. Every field season, underwater archaeologists make extraordinary discoveries that expand our vision of humanity's past.

On the following pages, we highlight just a few of these ongoing underwater archaeology projects, from the recovery of a sixth-century B.C. Phoenician shipwreck, where excavators found a cargo that included elephant tusks and amber, to work on a 19th-century vessel in Oklahoma's Red River that has given archaeologists their first look at early steamship design.

Roman Stone Carrier Kızılburun, Turkey	HMS Ontario Lake Ontario, New York	Min of the Desert The Red Sea, Egypt	Heroine Swink, Oklahoma	Corinthian Shipwrecks Adriatic Sea, Albania
Submerged DNA Chios, Greece	The Khan's Lost Fleet Bach Dang River, Vietnam	Tristán de Luna's Ships Pensacola Bay, Florida	Phoenician Wreck Cartagena, Spain	Liman Tepe Harbor Bay of Izmir, Turkey

In deciding which projects to feature, we canvassed several underwater archaeologists, and relied, in particular, on James Delgado, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and a valued member of our editorial advisory board. For every story we selected, Delgado told us about 10 other equally fascinating underwater excavations. To delve even more deeply into the word of underwater history check out the University of Rhode Island's online Museum of Underwater Archaeology and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology's website.

—The Editors

Coming soon: Accounts of other extraordinary nautical discoveries, including a list of the most important underwater finds of the past 50 years

Tips for Underwater Site-Seeing

Diving on an archaeological site is one of the great thrills of a lifetime. Here are a few commonsense guidelines to make sure that both you and the site remain safe.