Research notes: Istanbul

I'm in Turkey this month, doing research with some colleagues from Bologna on how cultural heritage here is organized, administered, and funded. I'll be blogging a little less than usual, but I'll share some reflections on our research as I'm able.

The vast excavation area at Yenikapı

One of our case studies is the excavations at Yenikapı, the hub station for the Marmaray metro that will connect the European and Asian sides of Istanbul under the Bosphorus. The Japanese-Turkish consortium building the subway thought that they had picked a clever spot outside of the archaeological zone of the ancient city - but as they excavated they found a Byzantine port with 32 well-preserved shipwrecks dating from the 5th-11th centuries! Many of them sunk with their cargos abord. This video from NatGeo is a good introduction (they don't allow embeds).

Look at these cool-ass shipwrecks!

Salvage excavations at the site are winding up after 5 years, and we're looking forward to learning more about the history of the project, which has been the largest urban archaeology project in Turkey's history. Funded by the construction subcontractors of the subway project, the archaeological work was supervised by the Istanbul Archaeology Museum with cooperation from Istanbul University, Texas A&M, and many other institutions.

Oh, and they found some 8,500 year old burials, extending the earliest known settlement of the city by a couple thousand years!

Salvage archaeology in an urban setting is pretty different from the Indiana Jones stereotype. It's more of an industrial operation, with huge tensions between construction companies (who live and die by deadlines) and archaeologists (who would much rather take their time and not think about money). What we're going to be doing is reconstructing the administration of the project: its organization, funding, history, controversies, and aftermath (what are they going to do with all those boats?!). It should be fun. I'll keep you posted.

 

Ghost ships under San Francisco

Being around archaeology and archaeologists makes you convinced that every city is numinous with  subterranean mystery. It's given me an almost theological perspective on my everyday environments.

Archaeologists at work in the bowels of the city (SF Gate)

As if to prove my point, construction workers in my hometown, San Francisco, discovered the remains of two 19th century ships, buried under 14 feet (4 meters) of sand. They were building a new sewer line to serve Visitacion Valley when they found the two 45-foot (14-meter) scow schooners. These were flat-bottomed cargo boats with sails used to deliver materials up and down the city in the later 1800s, which became obsolete after the introduction of motor vehicles in the 1900s. The excavation was contracted to Past Forward, an archaeological consulting firm. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

When engineers working near Candlestick Park last March drilled deep into the ground for soil samples, they pulled up chunks of wood and figured it was an old pier.
They had no idea it was a century-old ship, let alone two.

But that became clear this week when the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission uncovered what maritime experts believe are a pair of scow schooners, 90-foot-long workhorse vessels that plied the bay shallows in the late 1800s to deliver hay, salt, bricks, pork, coal, lumber and other cargo. Buried under more than 14 feet of sand and fill dirt, the 45-foot-long hull sections came to light at the mouth of an enormous trench that will house a new overflow sewage pipe for the Visitacion Valley neighborhood.

"These were the flatbed trucks of San Francisco Bay from the late 19th and early 20th century," said Jim Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, D.C. "They're largely forgotten now, but these scow schooners moved the goods that built the city and the Bay Area economy."

The Alma: Last surviving scow schooner on the bay (SF Gate

The boats will be recorded but not preserved: waterlogged wood is absurdly expensive to move and curate. It's too bad, since the boats are a last remnant of the weird marginal shoreline communities of southeast San Francisco in the late 1800s:

Before it was piled with fill dirt and paved over for development, the site held a small lagoon and spit that appeared and receded with the bay tides. Archaeologists theorize the bayfront spot became a popular ship graveyard around the turn of the century. Hundreds of vessels were run ashore, stripped of rope, sails and valuable metals, broken apart, burned and left to sink.

I've researched the area before: the shore around Candlestick point was dotted with Chinese shrimp fishing camps, slaughterhouses, shipbreaking yards, and run-down shacks with people doing god-knows-what. It was a kind of stinky-but-romantic isolation from the bustle of the city.  For more, see Pastron and Delgado's article on the shipbreaking yards of Yerba Buena Cove.

And, I couldn't sign off without mentioning San Francisco's long history of underground ship discoveries, dating back to the 1870s. A whole Gold Rush fleet was abandoned on the waterfront, and absorbed into the growing land of the city to form an archipelago of buried ships. At least one of them was turned into a restaurant! They turn up every couple of years, most recently in 2005. 

Tastiest time capsule: underwater champagne

AFP reports the discovery of the world's oldest champagne in a shipwreck 55 meters deep off of the Finnish island of Aaland.

Thought to be premium brand Veuve Clicquot, the 30 bottles discovered perfectly preserved at a depth of 55 metres (180 feet) could have been in a consignment sent by France's King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court.

If confirmed, it would be by far the oldest champagne still drinkable in the world, thanks to the ideal conditions of cold and darkness.

"We have contacted (makers) Moet & Chandon and they are 98 percent certain it is Veuve Clicquot," Christian Ekström, the head of the diving team, told AFP.

"There is an anchor on the cork and they told me they are the only ones to have used this sign," he said, adding that a sample of the champagne has been sent to Moet & Chandon for their analysis.

The first bottles of Veuve Cliquot were produced in 1772 and aged for 10 years. Production was interrupted by the French revolution in 1788, so these bottles must be from between 1782 and 1787. The magic of alcohol and six atmospheres of pressure have kept the wine drinkable!

Aaland wine expert Ella Gruessner Cromwell-Morgan, whom Ekstroem asked to taste the find, said it had not lost its fizz and was "absolutely fabulous".

"I still have a glass in my fridge and keep going back every five minutes to take a breath of it. I have to pinch myself to believe it's real," she said.

Cromwell-Morgan described the champagne as dark golden in colour with a very intense aroma.

"There's a lot of tobacco, but also grape and white fruits, oak and mead," she said of the wine's "nose".

As for the taste, "it's really surprising, very sweet but still with some acidity," the expert added, explaining that champagne of that period was much less dry than today and the fermentation process less controllable.

"One strong supposition is that it's part of a consignment sent by King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court," Cromwell-Morgan said. "The makers have a record of a delivery which never reached its destination."

Call it the solution of a historical mystery. As usual with such things, ownership is a little bit unclear, especially since the ship seems to be within Finland's territorial waters. The Aaland authorities are meeting next week to decide who owns the find, which is potentially worth millions at auction.


Pop champagne ain't a damn thing change / Spray it in the air make it champagne rain

It's been a good couple years for ancient champagne. This week's find beats the previous record for oldest bottle of Veuve: in 2008 a Scot named Chris James found an 1893 bottle in Torosay Castle, Isle of Mull, Scotland. It had been locked in a dark cabinet along with other liquors since at least 1897. Last year there was a tasting of a bottle of 1825 Perrier-Jouet Champagne at the winemaker's cellars in Epernay. The champagne was sweeter than the contemporary version (it was topped up with brandy in the cask) but was a bit flat but with notes of "truffles, caramel and mushrooms."

Veuve Cliquot is quite important in the history of champagne. Madame Cliquot (the 'widow' or veuve in the brand name) ran the firm from 1805 to 1866 and transformed champagne from an artisanal to a mass produced product. With her staff she invented a vastly more efficient way of removing lees and yeast from the bottles (riddling) - making champagne a clear beverage for the first time. The Finnish bottles, from the 1780s, predate this transformation and represent an rare surviving example of a pre-industrial wine.

Up from the deeps!

Shipwrecked wine is not as unusual as you might think. Wine has been a widely traded commodity for, well, as long as people have been making wine (at least 7,000 years). Booze was an important part of the neolithic revolution and people have been greedy for it ever since. In other words, drinking wine is very stone age. Nicola at Edible Geography (another blog I love) has a great reflection on shipwrecked wines:

It appears the ocean floor, if treated as a single entity, might actually be the world’s largest wine cellar – a sunken treasure trove of lost vintages awaiting rediscovery. Like squirrels digging up acorns, wreck-divers and salvage companies stumble upon another forgotten cache every few years.

She also points out that drinking the stuff can actually have some archaeological value:

A 1996 paper published in the Australasian Historical Archaeology journal discusses the analysis of wines recovered from an 1841 shipwreck – the William Salthouse, in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay – in terms of the evolution of Muscat. By combining chemical composition analysis with sensory data (i.e. sampling) and archival research, archaeologists with Heritage Victoria discovered that “Muscat was traditionally an unfortified style, quite different to today, due to a vinification technique called passerillage,” which created a wine with such high sugar levels that, to modern oenologists, it tastes like Sauternes.

Not that it's much of a challenge to convince archaeologists to drink wine. In fact one might wonder why the archaeology of booze is so underdeveloped, given the rampant drinking that besets the average dig.

I'll talk about wine recovered from Greek and Roman wrecks some other time. For now I'll leave you with some other more recent shipwrecked wine links, like the 1907 Heideseck discovered in a shipwreck a few years ago (mostly covered by luxury blogs, which ironically have really bad grammar and writing!) Also check out these wines recovered from the Titanic.

AP: Sinking oil threatens historic Gulf shipwrecks

From Cain Burdeau at Associated Press, an article about the archaeological impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis (via Boing Boing):

TIMBALIER ISLANDS, La. — Not just flora and fauna are getting caked in oil. So is the Gulf of Mexico's barnacled history of pirates, sea battles and World War II shipwrecks.

The Gulf is lined with wooden shipwrecks, American-Indian shell midden mounds, World War II casualties, pirate colonies, historic hotels and old fishing villages. Researchers now fear this treasure seeker's dream is threatened by BP PLC's deepwater well blowout.

The bridge of the USS Oriskany, off Pensacola, Fla. (AP)

Within 20 miles of the well, there are several significant shipwrecks — ironically, discovered by oil companies' underwater robots working the depths — and oil is most likely beginning to cascade on them.

"People think of them as being lost, but with the deepsea diving innovations we have today, these shipwrecks are easily accessible," said Steven Anthony, president of the Maritime Archaeological and Historical Society.

"If this oil congeals on the bottom, it will be dangerous for scuba divers to go down there and explore," Anthony said. "The spill will stop investigations; it will put a chill, a halt on (underwater) operations."

The wrecks include two 19th-century wooden ships known as the "Mica Wreck" and the "Mardi Gras Wreck." The German submarine U-166 and ships sunk by other German submarines during World War II are within the spill's footprint.

The Mica was a 200-year-old, two-masted schooner that sank sometime before 1850, according to a report by the Minerals Management Service. It was discovered about 2,500 feet deep in the Mississippi Canyon during work to lay a pipeline.

In 2002, the Mardi Gras wreck was discovered by oilfield workers in even deeper waters: About 4,000 feet down about 35 miles off the Louisiana coast. The wreck got its name from the pipeline project where the wreck was found: the Mardi Gras Gas Transmission System, a huge deepwater pipeline system.

Read the rest.