INSTITUTE OF NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY - Bodrum, Turkey |
| SERÇE LIMANI |
THE AMPHORAS: Old Jars from the North
by Frederick van Doorninck, Jr.
With possibly two or three exceptions, all of the amphoras from the Serçe Limani ship are Byzantine and belong to well-known amphora types that were in common use during that period. They include 89 piriform amphoras, six very small vessels with a pointed bottom, and six amphoras with a slightly concave bottom. All three types have been found in South Russia and throughout the Balkans, while examples of the first two types have been found in Syria and examples of the first type in Egypt.
At first, these amphoras left us very puzzled. What were Byzantine amphoras doing as part of the cargo of a ship that apparently had sailed westward from a Fatimid port into Byzantine waters? The answer to this question finally came only three years ago when a detailed study of the amphoras began to reveal that they had not been new at the time of their final voyage.
Evidence of this occurs among the amphoras of all three types but is particularly prevalent among the piriform amphoras, probably because they have the softest fabric and are more easily damaged. At least 64 of the piriform amphoras have rims that had undergone damage before the ship's sinking. Such damage is recognizable because it occurs primarily on the inside of the rim, is in the great majority of cases confined to one or both of the two rim quadrants located between the handles, and in many cases was caused by one or more vertical grooves cut into the rim's inner surface. This damage appears to have occurred as the result of someone prying out a stopper with a pointed object with one hand while holding one of the amphora's handles with the other. In at least four instances, pry damage became so severe that the rim was subsequently carved down to reduce unevenness.
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Pre-shipwreck damage to some of the piriform amphoras was of an even greater magnitude. Fifteen are missing a handle, and two or three were devoid of both handles and the entire neck. Not only were none of these missing parts found during excavation, but in a majority of cases where stumps of handles had remained, it is clear that they had been carved down into rounded knobs, while in one instance where the neck is missing, there is also evidence of the removal of uneven edges through carving. One of the amphoras had lost not only both its handles and neck but also all of its exterior surface. That this surface loss had occurred prior to the shipwreck was revealed by the fact that the surface was gone even where some pitch was adhering to the outside of the amphora. Was this surface deterioration the result of some earlier use? We hope that chemical analysis of the amphora's fabric will yield an answer.
The piriform amphoras had been painted
with a white wash when they were made, and one of them had received a new coat of wash
after it had been used for an appreciable length of time. The new wash had covered over
two graffiti on the amphora and some areas of pry damage on the rim. The amphora's surface
underneath the wash is worn and pitted.
It appears clear from the evidence just outlined that many of the amphoras had seen multiple reuse as transport jars. By late medieval times, the amphora was no longer the principle transport container, as it had been in antiquity, and one suspects that such reuse had become a commonplace response to their decreasing availability.
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As one might expect, the great majority of these amphoras have graffiti carved on them. The graffiti of greatest interest are those that appear to be marks of ownership of merchants involved in the ship's last voyage. These graffiti tend to be larger and more deeply carved than the others, and amphoras bearing any particular one of these marks appear to have been stowed together on the ship. For example, five amphoras bearing the name Leon (Fig. 5a) were all found together amidships. The most frequent of these marks of ownership is the letter M (Michael?). It appears alone on 25 of the amphoras but also occurs in four cases with one of four other marks joined to its left leg. All four of the latter marks also occur alone at least once on other amphoras. Business associates may be involved here. Another relatively frequent mark of ownership (Fig. 5b) also occurs on a small amphora of unique type on the ship and on some of the cooking pots belonging to the ship's cargo. Very close parallels for some of the marks of ownership, including this one, occur on medieval Bulgarian pottery. This suggests that at least some of the merchants with cargoes on the ship ma have been from the western Black Sea re ion and that the ship's destination may have been located somewhere within this general area.
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