Archaeologists are trying to piece together clues to the identity of a shipwreck in the north-west Highlands.
Three cannons and part of a wooden hull lie on the seabed near Drumbeg in Sutherland.
Archaeologists believe it could be the remains of a Dutch vessel that got into difficulty between 1650 and 1750.
The site was given emergency protected status on 18 March this year, but the Scottish government has proposed giving it a more permanent designation.
Local scallop divers have known of the wreck site in Eddrachillis Bay since the 1990s, but only recently have archaeologists been able to make a proper assessment of it. Read more.
Divers returning to the site of an ancient wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera have found artefacts scattered over a wide area of the steep, rocky sea floor. These include intact pottery, the ship’s anchor and some puzzling bronze objects. The team believes that hundreds more items could be buried in the sediment nearby.
The Antikythera wreck, which dates from the first century BC, yielded a glittering haul when sponge divers discovered it at the beginning of the 20th century. Among jewellery, weapons and statues were the remains of a mysterious clockwork device, dubbed the Antikythera mechanism.
Bar a brief visit by the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau in the 1970s (featured in his documentary Diving for Roman Plunder), no one had visited the wreck since, leading to speculation about what treasures might still be down there. Read more.
Rough seas that washed sand away from the beaches of York last weekend left behind a surprising sight for local residents: the remnants of a shipwreck.
Although the skeleton of the ship, believed to be at least 160 years old, has appeared from time to time on Short Sands Beach, little is known about the boat or how it ended up buried in the sand.
What’s left of the wooden hull – catalogued by the state as the Short Sands Beach Wreck – made news in the 1950s after being exposed by a storm. It last appeared after the powerful Patriots Day storm in 2007.
“It always seems to stir the town up when it does arrive,” said Tim Ellis, a lifelong resident whose mother brought a historian to York in 1958 to look at the wreck. Read more.
SAVANNAH, Ga. — The odd skeleton of wooden beams barely poked above the sands, exposed just enough by wind and tides for a beachcomber to report the curious find.
Fred Boyles, National Park Service superintendent on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, says the buried beams could have easily been overlooked as ordinary flotsam washed ashore on the beach. But archaeologists called to the remote Atlantic coastal island spent days last week unearthing an astonishing find: an old wooden shipwreck held together with wooden pegs, its backstory lost in time.
“Someone had the foresight to say that doesn’t just look like normal wood, and thank goodness they called us,” Boyles said of the island resident, who stumbled on the wreck around Christmas. “Frankly, had I been driving on the beach, I would’ve ridden right by.” Read more.
After storms lashed Scotland over the holidays, some strange World War II-era relics turned up on the country’s chilly coast, including decades-old lard from a shipwreck and bunker blocks buried on a beach.
At St. Cyrus Natural Reserve, about 100 miles (160 km) north of Edinburgh, four large chunks of lard washed up after the storms. Though their wooden containers disintegrated long ago, the lard chunks retained their barrel shape and they were still bright white under a thick crust of barnacles, local officials said.
“The depth of the swell during the storms we had over the holidays must have broke apart the shipwreck some more and caused the lard to escape,” Therese Alampo, manager at the reserve, said in a statement from Scottish Natural Heritage. Read more.
Medicinal tablets retrieved from a 2000-year-old shipwreck suggest that classical Mediterranean civilizations had sophisticated drugs.
Around 130 B.C.E., a merchant ship sank just off the coast of Italy’s Tuscany region. The wreck was spotted in 1974 and dubbed the Relitto del Pozzino after the beach near where it was found. Archaeological excavations in 1989 and 1990 yielded glass bowls, amphoras for carrying wine, lamps, and tin and bronze vessels all likely to have come from the eastern Mediterranean.
There were also artifacts presumably contained in a wooden chest that had rotted away: wooden vials, a cup possibly used for blood-letting, and other objects likely to have been found in an ancient physician’s medical bag. Read more.
GRAND HAVEN, MI – The remains of a wooden steamer built 125 years ago recently were uncovered in the Grand River, a surprising benefit of the historically low water levels.
The wooden sections of the 290-foot steamer Aurora, which burned in 1932, and parts of at least four other shipwreck hulks were exposed by the receding water line near the edges of Harbor Island. West Michigan maritime researchers deemed the Aurora the most significant of the finds, as it was once the largest wooden steamer on the Great Lakes.
After being alerted to the wooden pieces by area residents, Holland-based Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates (MSRA) members and officials with the Tri-Cities Historical Museum in Grand Haven investigated and surveyed the larger wreck, featuring the hull, sides and the propeller shaft cradle at the stern. Read more.
For more than 100 years, the sunken ship off Key Largo, Fla., was merely known as “Mike’s Wreck,” named after the employee of a local dive shop. But a team of archaeologists have finally identified the ship that sunk here in 1911 as the Hannah M. Bell, built in England in 1893.
The vessel once hauled sugar, cotton and other cargo between Europe, the United States and South America, according to a statement from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, where the Hannah M. Bell rests.
The 315-foot (96 meter) steamship ran aground on a shallow reef known today as Elbow Reef, located about 6 miles (10 kilometers) off Key Largo, on April 4, 1911. The vessel was loaded with coal bound for Vera Cruz, Mexico. Read more.
