Serçe Limani: An Eleventh-Century Shipwreck Vol. 1, The Ship and Its Anchorage, Crew, and Passengers

Preface

This volume begins a report on the excavation conducted by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Serçe Limanı, Turkey, from  to . The words of scholars more knowledgeable than I explain its purpose and intended value. We know infinitely more about daily life in Imperial Rome in the st and nd centuries A.D. than in any period of Byzantine history. I may add that we know considerably more about Byzantine life from the th to the mid-th century than about the four hundred years that followed; it is only in the mid-th that the darkness begins to be somewhat dispelled. It is useful to remember that our minute knowledge of Roman life is largely based on three categories of evidence: . A literature that, whatever its moralistic or satirical exaggerations, does provide a vivid reflection of contemporary usages; . Archaeology; and . Epigraphy. All three categories are sadly deficient for the Byzantine period; and while we may hope to fill out eventually our archaeological information , we have no prospect of either changing the character of Byzantine literature or of supplying an epigraphic documentation that largely peters out after the th century. Cyril Mango1 Byzantine archaeology has traditionally tended to concern itself above all with churches and their decorations. This is not unexpected, as until recently most Byzantine archaeologists were by training art historians. It has the unfortunate result that we know very little about the material background to everyday life. Robert Browning2 This volume and those that follow are about many of the objects of daily life carried aboard a ship of the middle of the first half of the eleventh century A.D., and about the ship itself. The ship trafficked in both the Byzantine and Islamic worlds of its time, and carried to the bottom of the sea all those objects , of mixed cultural origins, that were in use during one specific day in the past. Preface If we know more of daily life in eleventh-century Islam than of that in contemporary Byzantine society, even there detailed knowledge of commonplace utensils is lacking. Writing of the excavation of medieval Qasr al-Hayr, the excavators could only say: With the exception of Hama, whose small objects were recently published, not a single excavation of an Islamic site has made such [small] finds available in any systematic manner. As a result, we entirely lacked immediate references for the materials we found, and it seems clear that a useful task for future scholarship will be the collation of archaeologically retrieved documents by technique and period. In the meantime we were left with one of three possibilities. One was to ignore such information and leave it unpublished, as has been done in any number of instances; its very existence is then forgotten. The second possibility was to do the full comparative study that is required by any one object or group; inasmuch as it is a particularly time-consuming endeavor requiring much work in storerooms of many museums, such an enterprise would have taken many years and could have delayed the presentation of most of our results. We have, therefore, chosen a third course, which is to present our information with as clear an internal identification of its character as possible and to limit comparisons and comments to such points as seemed immediately accessible. Oleg Grabar3 No one will spend as much effort trying to understand a site and its artifacts as its excavators, and thus it would seem that they have a duty to devote as much time as is required to interpret what they call “small finds” or “miscellaneous finds,” those objects of daily life so often ignored. But excavators of Islamic sites, like those of Byzantine sites, are often trained as art historians and are more interested in objects of artistic merit than mundane utensils. Because every item found on a ship was carried onto that ship for a purpose—unless accidentally left in a shipping container or personal bundle from a previous event, and thus   brought on board unintentionally—there will be none of the usual chapters on “miscellaneous finds” found in most excavation reports, for we must try to understand the reason every item was on the ship’s last voyage. Until society produces scholars who know Islamic and Byzantine history, read medieval Arabic and Byzantine Greek, and are trained in ceramics, numismatics, zooarchaeology, epigraphy , ship construction, silliography, materials analysis, art history , anthropology, diving, and a host of other subjects and skills, a shipwreck...