BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Advancing Marine Archaeology

Cutting-edge tech reveals new insights into ancient past

The oceans and seas are the last great frontier for Near Eastern archaeology. Year after year, the Mediterranean Sea yields rich new data from prehistory to late antiquity: ports and harbors, maritime facilities, and shipwrecks that make global headlines, such as the 14th-century BCE Uluburun shipwreck and its precious cargo discovered in 1982 off the coast of Turkey.¹ These discoveries require scholars to employ a special set of tools and methodologies that characterize a specialized subfield—marine archaeology.

Marine archaeology (also called nautical or underwater archaeology) is relatively young. It was pioneered in the second half of the 20th century by figures such as George Bass and Cemal Pulak in Turkey, Peter Throckmorton in Greece, Honor Frost in Lebanon and Cyprus, and Avner Raban and Elisha Linder in Israel.² In its early years, the methods often involved using measuring tapes, carpenters’ levels, and plexiglass sheets to record features while underwater. Usually, control points were selected around the excavation site and then artifacts and features were triangulated and plotted on the plexiglass sheet with a pencil. But times have changed, and the field has developed a range of sophisticated, high-tech methodologies rooted in geoscience and cyber-archaeology that are providing fresh insights into human–environmental interactions, ancient trade networks, and social change through time.

Here, we highlight some of these methods based on the research of a joint marine archaeological project between the University of Haifa and the University of California, San Diego, aimed at studying how coastal societies have adapted to cultural and environmental change over the past 10,000 years. This collaborative project focuses on the Carmel coast in northern Israel—mostly in and around the ancient town of Dor, 13 miles south of Haifa—and melds together three distinct methodological elements, namely marine geophysics, paleoenvironmental research, and underwater survey and excavation.

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The first methodological element, marine geophysics, refers to non-invasive remote sensing techniques that can examine the physical characteristics of submerged landscapes. The most useful methods include side-scan sonar, multibeam echo sounders, marine magnetometers, and sub-bottom profilers. These techniques help assess the potential for finding archaeological remains and understanding their geological and environmental setting. Like sonar systems, sub-bottom profilers use sound, but map different strata beneath the seafloor. In shallow waters (less than 32 feet deep), some instruments can penetrate sediments up to 65 feet deep. In the South Bay at Tel Dor, we used a compact sub-bottom profiler to link seismic survey data of buried land surfaces with the actual sediment layers identified in cores we extracted. This allowed us to reconstruct the changing landscape around Tel Dor across more than ten millennia, from the Pottery Neolithic through to the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

The second element in our methodology focuses on obtaining sediment cores in coastal zones and around submerged archaeological sites. These contexts are significant because marine organisms, dust, and other sediments are constantly deposited on the sea floor. On land, organisms and sediments deposited by wind or water are trapped in depressions, such as lakebeds or archaeological sites. Data from these sediment cores allow us to reconstruct past environments, temperatures, and land surfaces. The various layers provide a timeline of deposition events that can be dated with different laboratory techniques or through datable artifacts, such as stone tools and pottery.

Indeed, sediment analysis of cores collected in Dor’s South Bay helped us to identify a Neolithic tsunami. During earlier excavations in the bay, we found pottery sherds, a wall, and an arrowhead dating to the Pottery Neolithic period (late seventh–fifth millennia BCE). We then extracted two sediment cores on the beach that penetrated 30 feet below the surface to reach calcareous sandstone bedrock. Inside swamp layers dated to the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic (c. 9700–6750 BCE), we found a layer of saltwater seashells, mollusks, and limestone pebbles, which could only have arrived on a tsunami wave from a distant sea environment. Given that the Neolithic seashore was 1 to 2 miles seaward from the current shoreline, the seashell deposit had to have traveled on a wave that was at least 55 feet high.

This powerful tsunami destroyed all traces of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic villages that dotted the region, decimated coastal farmland, and forced coastal inhabitants to move into nearby valleys. It was only around 500 years later that Pottery Neolithic villages (c. 6750–4800 BCE), like the one we found in the South Bay, began to re-populate the Carmel coast.

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The third element in our methodology involves underwater excavation and cyber-archaeology, the latter being a marriage of archaeology with computer science, engineering, and the natural sciences.³ Previous excavations showed that Dor was a thriving Hellenistic and Roman city (fourth century BCE–fourth century CE), with ample evidence for Mediterranean maritime exchange but no remains of actual port facilities. Our underwater surveys and excavations showed that Dor was devastated by sea level rise during the Hellenistic period but that it recovered some of its importance during the late Roman period.⁴

We discovered a Hellenistic fortification system, which protected an anchorage in the South Bay, and a Roman quay-like structure in the North Bay. On land, our colleagues Ayelet Gilboa, S. Rebecca Martin, and the late Ilan Sharon excavated Hellenistic-period monumental architecture, well-planned streets, temples, imported pottery, and other features of a rich maritime settlement, which the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus characterized as a “fortress difficult to take” (Jewish Antiquities 13.223).⁵ Most exciting, however, our marine excavations finally discovered the late Roman harbor at Dor, a mere 8 miles north of the major port city of Caesarea Maritima.

Today, mapping of underwater and terrestrial archaeological remains is made easy and accurate using technologies based on photogrammetry, where digital photographs are used to create 3D models and measurements of areas or objects. These novel methods provide precious new data to further our understanding of ancient maritime and coastal societies.

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Thomas E. Levy is Distinguished Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego. He specializes in ancient technology and social evolution.

Gilad Shtienberg is a geoscientist at the University of California, San Diego. He focuses on coastal geomorphology and human–environment interactions in the eastern Mediterranean.

Assaf Yasur-Landau is Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology and head of the Recanati Institute of Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa. He focuses on coastal archaeology and underwater survey.

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Notes

1. Eric H. Cline, “Littoral Truths,” Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 1999.

2. For discussions of some of this pioneering work, see Cemal Pulak, “Shipwreck!” Archaeology Odyssey, September/October 1999; and Shelley Wachsmann, “Milestones: George F. Bass (1932–2021),” BAR, Fall 2021.

3. For more on cyber-archaeology, see Thomas Levy et al., Cyber-Archaeology in the Holy Land: The Future of the Past (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013).

4. See Assaf Yasur-Landau et al., “Sea Level Changes and the Locations of the ‘Missing’ Hellenistic and Roman Harbours at Tel Dor, Israel,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 53.2 (2024), pp. 515–534; and Gilad Shtienberg et al., “Changing Environments and Human Interaction During the Pleistocene–Early Holocene from the Shal-low Coastal Area of Dor, Israel,” Quaternary Research 105 (2021), pp. 1–18.

5. Jessica L. Nitschke, S. Rebecca Martin, and Yiftah Shalev, “Between Carmel and the Sea. Tel Dor: The Late Periods,” Near Eastern Archaeology 74.3 (2011), pp. 132–154.

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