The Plemmirio Roman wreck
The Plemmirio Roman Wreck
This page contains additional material and images for Chapter 4 of my book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks.
The photos on this page were all taken in 1983-7 when I led expeditions from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge to investigate a Roman wreck off the cliffs of Plemmirio near Siracusa in Sicily. Writing this chapter in my book has taken me back to a time of great excitement early in my career – from first seeing the wreck aged 18 in 1981 to the completion of my PhD a decade later, it was the main focus of my diving and archaeological work. Even after that, it continued to be the backdrop for much that I did – leading to collaborations in the 1990s that resulted in groundbreaking scientific analyses of Roman pottery, providing the basis for my final published report on the cargo in 2001 and then giving me the inspiration for a fictional wreck in my novel The Last Gospel in 2007. Like many archaeologists who have had an intensive involvement with a site while still in their early twenties, I continue to look back on it through different lenses as my thinking about the past and the purpose of archaeology has evolved – I see it now as much as a stimulus to my imagination as I do the source of new ‘data’ that would have been my main focus as a student intent on writing dissertations and reports, and I am also able to put it in a wider and more varied historical context than I might have done then. In writing about it again all these years later I find that I have lost none of the excitement for the project that I felt then, and that it continues to play out for me in the wrecks that I investigate now – I have the same feeling today when I dive down on a 17th century wreck off England as I had as an undergraduate when I first saw those Roman amphoras on the seabed off Sicily.
I am very grateful to more than 40 divers and archaeologists who formed these expeditions and made this work possible; their names are in the published reports along with those of the bodies which provided funding, equipment and supplies. Financial backers included the British Academy, the British School at Rome, Cambridge University Classics Faculty, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, The Society of Antiquaries and The Keith Muckelroy Memorial Fund. Among many people who helped this project, by providing references and in many other ways, I am especially grateful to Professor Peter Warren, Henry Hurst, Dr Catherine Hills, Professor Anthony Snodgrass, Gerhard Kapitän and the officers of the archaeological superintendency in Siracusa who provided permits for the work. Above all I am grateful to Dr Toby Parker, who set me on this path when he was my personal tutor at the University of Bristol and himself led the expedition that rediscovered the site in 1974.
I’ve listed my main publications arising from the project here. Only two of them are available for free to read online - the British Medical Journal and Archaeometry articles - but for the rest if you click on the links you can read the abstracts.
Gibbins, D.J.L. and Parker, A.J., 1986. The Roman wreck of c. AD 200 at Plemmirio, near Siracusa (Sicily): interim report. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 15: 267-304.
Gibbins, D.J.L., 1988. Surgical instruments from a Roman shipwreck off Sicily. Antiquity 62: 294-7.
Edge, C. and Gibbins, D., 1988. Underwater discovery of Roman surgical equipment. British Medical Journal 6664: 1645-6.
Gibbins, D.J.L., 1989. The Roman wreck of c. AD 200 at Plemmirio, near Siracusa (Sicily): second interim report. The domestic assemblage 1: medical equipment and pottery lamps. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 18: 1-25.
Gibbins, D.J.L., 1991. The Roman wreck of c. AD 200 at Plemmirio, near Siracusa (Sicily): third interim report. The domestic assemblage 2: kitchen and table pottery, glass and fishing weights. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 20: 227-46.
R.J. Taylor, Robinson, V.J. and Gibbins, D.J.L., 1997. An investigation of the provenance of the Roman amphora cargo from the Plemmirio B shipwreck. Archaeometry 39: 9-21.
Gibbins, D., 2001. A Roman shipwreck of c. AD 200 at Plemmirio, Sicily: evidence for north African amphora production during the Severan period. World Archaeology 32: 311-334.
Click on these image of the wreck site and artefacts to enlarge:
A view south-east from the Plemmirio cliffs over the wreck site and the Ionian Sea, with the next landfall being eastern Libya some 700 kilometres away. Only the waters close inshore are within safe diving depth using compressed air - the depth drops to over 3,000 metres by the time you would reach the position of the ship visible on the horizon. Every day when the weather allowed we drove our boats to and from our campsite at Capo di Ognina to the south, tying up to the shotline buoy over the wreck and carrying out two dives per day with a four hour interval. An access point along the peninsula about a kilometre to the east allowed divers to rest on shore between dives and be taken to and from the site in one of the boats.
Jim Coates and Melanie Rees acting as timekeeper and safety diver on the site. This was before the widespread use of dive computers, so all diving was carried out using watches and depth gauges to calculate remaining bottom time according to the British Sub-Aqua Club tables. As we did not have a recompression chamber ourselves - the nearest was at Catania, just up the coast - all diving was done according to ‘no-stop’ times, meaning that only a safety stop was required to surface. A typical dive to 30 metres allowed a 20 minute ‘no-stop’ bottom time, which happened to be about right for the cylinder size and pressure we were using - one tank lasted a dive with a safety leeway. Over three seasons and hundreds of dives we had no incidents of decompression sickness or other pressure-related illness.
One of the bronze scalpels from the site, comprising the handle and attached ‘blunt dissector’, the leaf-shaped blade to the left. The iron scalpel blade to the right survived only as ferrous residue in a deep notch that held it (you can see the vertical notch on the side that held a retaining wire to keep the blade in place). These scalpels are rare examples of a type that was most probably for specialised eye surgery, and are unique finds in a Roman wreck of this period. I am very grateful to Professor Anthony Snodgrass, Ralph Jackson and Dr Ernst Künzl for help with this identification (length 8.5 cm).
My drawings of two of the pottery oil lamps from the wreck. The lower one is stamped IVNDRA, making this a rare example of a lamp with the name of this lamp maker in or near Rome. I am very grateful to Donald Bailey of the British Museum for help with this identification.
A view of me raising an amphora top from the wreck. The line nearest to me is the shotline, attached to a mooring point on the seabed, and the other one is a weighted line that allowed us to sink the buoy a few metres below the surface at the end of each day, meaning that the site marker was not visible and was below any small boats that might come this close inshore.
Doron Cohen and Malin Dixon using a lifting bag to raise large fragments of an amphora from the deeper part of the site. Using a lifting bag is a tricky business as the air inside expands on ascent and needs to be continuously bled off - as Doron is doing here - in order to prevent the bag from rocketing to the surface. At the same time, the divers need to be aware of their own ascent rate in order to keep within decompression rules, so using the shotline for security was essential.
Divers excavating a nearly intact amphora at the deepest part of the site, in 42-45 metres depth. At this point the steep rocky slope or ‘talus’ ended in a level sandy plan that extended out to sea for some distance, gradually dropping to 70 metres and then more steeply to abyssal depths in excess of 3,000 metres. Because we had no recompression chamber and planned our diving within the British Sub-Aqua Club tables, we only did a few ‘bounce dives’ to 50 metres to see if any more of the wreck extended out into deeper waters. The letters CUUEG on the diver’s cylinder refer to the Cambridge University Underwater Exploration Group, who generously lent us equipment - many of the divers were also members of CUUEG.
A close-up view of the amphora under excavation in the previous photo, a large cylindrical ‘Africano grande’ type. Nowadays I would have many pictures like this - sometime over a hundred per dive! - but the 1980s was a long time before digital photography and underwater cameras were few and far between, whereas now virtually every diver takes a camera with them. All of the photos on this page were scanned from slides.
A photo of me raising an amphora top from the wreck.
A view of artefacts from the wreck, including a beautiful intact small amphora, amphora tops and bases of the main cylindrical types on the wreck, pottery oil lamps, kitchen and table pottery and in the left foreground one of the bronze scalpels.
I drew all of the amphora tops and bases from the wreck before they were consigned to the Siracusa archaeological superintendency. Drawings such as these, done at 1:1 scale by balancing the amphora on a sheet of film and tracing around it using a set square, are invaluable for recording details of manufacture and shape that may allow the amphora to be sourced to a particular area and even the hand of an individual potter to be identified. These are all examples of the main ‘Africano grande’ form on the wreck.
Jenny Lobell with two of the amphoras from the wreck. The large amphora, of a form termed ‘Africano grande’, was the main cargo amphora type the ship, but there were also examples of the smaller ‘Africano piccolo’, of identical fabric but narrower. These two forms were made in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis in the late 2nd and early 3rd century AD and were respectively for fish produce and olive oil. The ship carried fewer than 200 amphoras, but the larger ones had a capacity of some 60 litres each so would have represented a considerable consignment - probably destined for Rome.
A photo by Jim Coates of me in 1985 examining finds from the wreck before they were consigned to the Siracusa archaeological superintendency. All of these are published in the reports that I wrote on the wreck after the end of the last field season in 1987. This and the previous photo were taken at the expedition camp at Cape di Ognina, about 7 km south-west of Penisola della Maddalena.
The lid of one of the smaller ‘Africano piccolo’ amphoras.
Two glass fragments recovered from the wreck - the handle of a bottle or jug and the base of a fine bowl.
An Africano Grande amphora top stamped with letters ending PP, almost certainly referring to the Praetorian Prefect Gaius Fulvius Plautianus and dating the wreck closely to about AD 200, when he held this office.
My first-ever media interview, by Malcolm Billings for a BBC Radio 4 ‘Origins’ programme in 1983. I’d just come up from a dive on the wreck and was telling Malcolm what it looked like on the seabed (and checking my depth gauge to tell him my maximum depth - this was in the days before dive computers!) The episode aired on Sunday 4 September 1983 at 1600, but unfortunately does not seem to have been archived.
Preparing to dive with Julie Cole in 1987. The cross-shaped cleft in the cliff marking the site can be seen to the left, and the lighthouse on Capo Murro di Porco in the background. There was no access to the sea from the cliffs for more than a kilometre on either side of the site, so all diving was from boats. One great advantage of the Mediterranean for dive planning is the near-absence of tides - a similar headland in the Atlantic such as the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, where I do much of my diving now, would be swept by strong tidal currents several times a day.
A diver using a grid square to plan artefacts on the seabed. Much time was spent planning the site using tape-measure triangulation from baselines as well as detailed recording as here. Although the wreck was scattered, with many of the amphoras broken into sherds (as you can see here), the plan revealed clear patterns in distribution including a concentration of cooking pottery and domestic items at one end of this site, showing that there was some relation to the original shipboard layout.
The upper surface of a pottery oil lamp of north African manufacture showing a reclining antelope (diameter 4.5 cm). Of the four lamps found at the site, two were African and two from the area of Rome, reflecting the previous voyages of the ship. Like the cooking pottery, fire-blackening showed that these lamps had been for use on the ship rather than being cargo.
One of a series of photos taken by Chris Edge showing me with a Roman scalpel above the gully where it was discovered, at 27 metres depth. The site was covered with rock debris from the cliff as well as marine growth, and small items such as this could easily have been missed - but careful excavation paid off! All three of the scalpels were found at this spot, probably having been in some form of medical instrument case.
This mosaic, now lost (and known only from this black and white photo), was excavated in the 1950s at a baths complex near the shore at Sullecthum (present-day Ras Salakta) in eastern Tunisia. With neutron activation analysis of the amphora sherds from the wreck showing that the cargo most probably originated in this port, it is fascinating to see the depiction of the stern of a merchant vessel as well as its name - Leontius, meaning ‘Lion.’ Could this have been the name of the Plemmirio ship?
One of the mosaics in front of an office in the ‘Square of the Merchants’ at Ostia, the port city near the mouth of the river Tiber that served Rome. The letters show that this one was for the navicularii - the merchants - of Sullecthum, the port in Tunisia that was the likely home of the Plemmirio ship. The two ships give an excellent idea of the appearance of Roman merchantmen of this period, with a main square sail and stern steering oars, and the fish at the bottom may suggest that they specialised in salted fish and fish sauce - an important protein staple in Rome.
In my chapter I mention my grandfather’s experience during the Allied invasion of Sicily on 10 July 1943, when he was Second Officer of an Assault Landing ship putting ashore Canadian and British troops and equipment. This photo shows a British ship on fire after air attack as troops are put ashore only about three miles south of Penisola della Maddalena - within sight of the Plemmirio cliffs. You can read more about the assault in a detailed blog that I wrote by clicking on the link below (Imperial War Museum, © IWM A 18091).
