Cape Gelidonya - History

History

The eccentric photojournalist Peter Throckmorton, out of New York, arrived there in the mid 1950s after a controversial campaign where he was profiling the Algerian War from the point of view of the Algerian rebels fighting against French troops, which would later lead to an alleged altercation between himself and another team member, Claude Duthuit, who was fighting with the French. Throckmorton arrived in the small city of Bodrum in the southwest of Turkey, built on the ancient city of Halicarnassus, where the remnants of one of the ancient wonders of the world the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus can still be seen today. He had received word that a bronze statue of the Greek god Demeter was pulled up by fishing nets and left on the beach, but by the time he had arrived the statue was taken and would eventually find a home in the Museum of Izmir, north of Bodrum.

Throckmorton came to know Captain Kemal of the sponge fishing boat the Mandlinci. The captain told Throckmorton that he knew of many ancients sites that were lying on the seabed, one he planned to dynamite the following year. Throckmorton urged him to preserve the site and convinced the Captain to draw a map, allegedly on the back of a napkin. He would return in 1958 under the flag of the Explorers' Club with filmmaker Stan Waterman among others. They set out to visit a number of underwater archaeological sites and finally arrived at Cape Gelidonya, where they spent most of their time trying to identify the site. Finally on the last day they located the site on one of the small islands off the Cape.

He convinced the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to sponsor an excavation of the site. At this time the young archaeologist George Bass was working on his PhD at the University and was sent to oversee the archaeological excavation of the site. They returned in 1960 and completed the first archaeological excavation of a shipwreck underwater in its entirety. This was the oldest known shipwreck at the time, only being surpassed by the discovery of the Uluburun Shipwreck in the early 1980s. This was one the first projects that led to the development of the field of Nautical Archaeology, along with the excavation of the Viking Skuldelev ships at Roskilde in 1962, and the discovery and raising of the Swedish warship the Vasa (ship) in 1961.