Three shipwrecks discovered off Tunisian
The perilous Mediterranean sea route along the Skerki coast has been of great strategic importance to conquerors – and a treasure trove for robbers – for thousands of years. It is a watery graveyard for hundreds of ships sunk in battle from ancient to modern times, or mourned by the relentlessly opposing currents and menacing rocky heights that lurk beneath the surface.
The area bordered by Sicily to the north and the Tunisian coast to the southwest has now handed over the secrets of its depths to an international group of underwater archaeologists. In the largest and most ambitious international mission ever undertaken under the auspices of UNESCO, experts from Algeria, Croatia, Egypt, France, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Tunisia mapped 10 square kilometers of seabed for study and protection. their shared underwater cultural heritage.
Two robots and multi-beam sonar were used to document the remains of six ancient and 20th-century shipwrecks, three of which were previously unknown. The multilateral team of the mission, which has been in the works for four years, finally got together for two weeks last year and presented their results on Thursday.
“Underwater heritage is very important,” UNESCO archaeologist Alison Faynot told the National. “You think it’s extremely protected and inaccessible, yet it’s quite fragile and just changing the environment or the seabed can have a very dangerous effect on it.” “People see underwater cultural heritage as a treasure and something to collect, but it is very important. Every little detail gives us so many clues about where we came from. “In the Mediterranean, it shows why it matters so much, because eight countries are participating and they have come together because they want to share the legacy.
“Underwater cultural heritage is not a treasure, it’s vulnerable, so we really need to protect it and protect the people.” The group’s mission consisted of two independent projects to thoroughly investigate the Skerki Bank on the Tunisian continental shelf and follow in the footsteps of American archaeologists Robert Ballard and Anna Marguerite McCann in the Sicilian Channel.
In one of the particularly dangerous zones of the Skerki coast, during a full survey of the seabed around Keith Reef, three previously unknown wrecks were discovered: one of them is believed to be a merchant ship that sank in BC. It dates from the 1st century. BC; and two, a metal vessel and a wooden vessel, from the late 19th or early 20th century.
