Press Releases
ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA LECTURE
Lecture Title: "A Monumental Cargo: The Roman Column Wreck at Kizilburun, Turkey"
Date: Sunday, September 30, 2007
Where: Abbott Lecture Hall, Joslyn Art Museum, 2201 Dodge Street, Omaha
Time: 2:00 PM
The Lincoln - Omaha Society of the Archaeological Institute of America announces its first lecture of the 2007-08 season. Dr. Deborah Carlson, an archaeologist specializing on ancient shipwrecks of the eastern Mediterranean, will deliver a talk on one of the more fascinating underwater investigations in the world today.
Since 2005, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) at Texas A&M University has been excavating the remains of a marble carrier wrecked off the Aegean coast of Turkey at Kizilburun. The ship was transporting the components of a newly-quarried monumental column comprised of eight enormous smooth drums, each about 1 1/2 meters in diameter and over a meter tall. Once assembled, the drums would have formed a column nearly ten meters tall, weighing around 60 tons. Isotopic and maximum grain-size analyses of the marble indicate an origin in the quarries of Proconnesus Island in the Sea of Marmara, while transport amphoras and associated ceramics suggest that the wreck dates from the first century B.C.
In 2006, the team caught its first glimpse of the ship itself, preserved beneath more than 70 tons of stone cargo. We accomplished this by carefully ballooning off-site four of the eight massive marble drums, weighing nearly 7 tons a piece. As the excavation continues in 2007, one of our goals will be to study the wooden hull remains in order to gain insight into the vessel's construction and determine whether or not this was a purpose-built stone carrier of the type the Romans called a navis lapidaria.
Deborah Carlson is the field director for the Kizilburun shipwreck project and is assistant professor in the Nautical Archaeology Program of the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses in trade and seafaring in the ancient world. She has assisted in the direction of both terrestrial and underwater excavations in Italy, Greece, and Turkey and is the 2003-04 recipient of the Archaeological Institute of America's Olivia James Traveling Fellowship.
Future AIA Talks:
Oct. 25 James Russell, University of British Columbia
Thurs., 7:30 PM From Sextant to GPS: Two Centuries of Archaeology in Rough Cilicia, Turkey
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Feb. 10 Sidnie White Crawford, University of Nebraska
TBA
Abbott Lecture Hall, Joslyn Art Museum, 2201 Dodge Street, Omaha
March 2 Susan Rotroff, Washington University
Sun., 2:00 PM The Unsolved Mystery of the Bone Well in Ancient Athens
Abbott Lecture Hall, Joslyn Art Museum, 2201 Dodge Street, Omaha
April 7 John Pollini, University of Southern California
Mon., 7:30 PM Christian Destruction and Desecration of Images of Classical Antiquities
Room 15, Richards Hall, Stadium Drive, UNL
April 21 Francis Harrold, University of Nebraska - Kearney
Sun., 2:00 PM The Fate of the Neanderthals: Current Research and Debate
Room 15, Richards Hall, Stadium Drive, UNL
