INSTITUTE OF NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY - Bodrum, Turkey - Bodrum, Turkey |
| ULUBURUN |
Continuing Study
of the Uluburun Shipwreck Artifacts
by Claire Peachey
More that 18,000 complete and fragmentary artifacts were raised during INA's excavation of the Uluburun shipwreck between 1984 and 1994. Although conservation by INA staff and volunteers at the Bodrum Castle Laboratory has proceeded year-round since the first season of excavation, the large number of artifacts and the long treatment times required mean that work will continue for several years after the final artifact was Raised from the seabed. It is INA's experience that e every three-month season of Excavation requires two years of conservation and study, so we could be here until the year 2007! Over the past year so, conservation efforts have been increased so that study and publication can proceed in a timely manner.
Inviting conservation trainees and professionals to participate in the Uluburun conservation project allows far more artifacts to receive treatment than would otherwise be possible. An equally valuable benefit of the system is that many people can receive training and hands-on experience with the special problems of marine conservation, which they cannot easily receive elsewhere. The Uluburun shipwreck yielded a remarkable variety of materials in different states of preservation, allowing conservators to observe and treat a wide range of problems. In addition, this group of conservation interns, along with archaeology students and professionals working in the laboratory and living together in the INA headquarters complex, made for a lively community and a continuous change of ideas. INA considers this to be an important aspect of its presence in Bodrum.
A significant amount of time and space in
the laboratory is devoted to collection and production of pure water, maintenance of the
equipment and storage tanks, and the regular monitoring of salinity and changing of water
in artifact containers. Large numbers of ceramic shards, glass ingots, copper ingots,
ballast stones, tin fragments, and other artifacts were desalinated in bulk after the
water supply was secured. Uluburun shipwreck artifacts treated this year include copper
and tin ingots; tin vessel fragments; whole ceramic Canaanite jars, lamps, bowls, pilgrim
flasks, and juglets; coarseware and fineware ceramic shards; worked and unworked bone,
shell, ostrich eggshell fragments, tortoise carapace, and ivory, the last including both
hippopotamus and elephant tusks, as well as many delicately carved objects; bronzes such
as bowls and bowl fragments, tools, balance pans, cauldron handles, pins, and blades;
whole and fragmentary glass ingots; zoomorphic and geometric pan-balance weights of stone,
lead, and bronze; molded faience vessel shards; wood fragments; lead and tin-alloy
jewelry; amber and stone beads; and stone tools. Treatment usually involves removal of
calcareous marine encrustations, identification and removal of corrosion products to
reveal original surfaces, desalination to prevent corrosion or physical damage by salt
crystallization, and slow drying. Many materials also require appropriate strengthening
with polymers, corrosion inhibitors, or protective coatings.
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One of the priorities this year was the conservation of ivory and bone artifacts. A new treatment with a waterbased consolidant was tested in an attempt to reduce the physical and chemical stresses to the objects, but it was found that the "tried and true" organic solvent-based method was more consistently successful. Several unworked hippopotamus and elephant tusks are in the final stages of treatment, and several carved ivory and bone objects are either completed or nearly completed. Objects include a flat disk, hinges , inlay strips with fastening pegs still preserved, and a long, cylindrical rod, all of which are decorated with incised circles, false spirals, and other geometric designs; several partially worked or scrap pieces; unidentified button-like objects; pomegranate-shaped finials; and perhaps two of the most unusual ivory objects on the shipwreck, an acrobat carved in the round, and a trumpet in the shape of a ram's horn carved from a hippopotamus incisor (fig. 1). This latter object and a few of the other ivories, including two duck-shaped cosmetics containers conserved in previous years, still require time-consuming reconstruction of their many fragments.
Fig. 1. A hippopotamus incisor carved into a ram's horn-shaped trumpet. Drawing by Sema Pulak.
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The laboratory also focused on the treatment of ceramics this year, for two specific research purposes. The first was to identify and quantify the utilitarian coarseware vessels carried on the Uluburun ship, as a possible clue to the identity of the ship's crew. The second was to quantify and sample the Cypriot White Slip II bowls for neutron activation analysis, which may identify clay sources. One conservation intern, Lori McCoy, of the Art Conservation Program at the University of Delaware, is performing accelerated aging tests on an adhesive formulation being used on ceramics in the Bodrum laboratory for the first time this year. Thousands of shards were excavated from the shipwreck and will require years to reconstruct into vessels once they are cleaned, desalinated, dried, and sorted.
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Another 42 of the 354 copper oxhide-shaped ingots (oblong with four, or occasionally two, protrusions like handles from the long sides) were treated this year, as were a total of 20 copper bun, copper oval, copper quarter-oxhide, and tin quarter-oxhide ingots. A large outdoor storage tank was filled with rainwater and devoted to bulk desalination of cleaned copper oxhide ingots, as an improvement upon desalination in individual basins.
Several small bronze artifacts were also treated, but only a fraction of the hundreds that remain: fish hooks, spearheads, arrowheads, pins, blades, bowl and cauldron fragments, three daggers, a saw, a sword, and more. Most of the bronzes are heavily concreted and retain little metallic strength, so are painstakingly slow to treat.
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It was planned that treatment of the wood remains from the Uluburun shipwreck could begin this year. However, repair and re-installation of steel tanks for polyethylene glycol treatment await construction of the building that will house the tanks. The remains include logs of ebony and cedar, a leaf of a folded wooden writing tablet, the lid and base of two small containers, the "keel" and planks of the ship's hull, the branches of what may have been a woven bulwark, branches and twigs of dunnage, and many miscellaneous fragments. All Uluburun wood that was in plain water was put into a fungicidal solution of boric acid and borax.
It is hoped that the laboratory will soon be able to acquire a freeze-dryer so that the wood can be stabilized with a polyethylene glycol pretreatment followed by freeze-drying, a method that has been highly successful with waterlogged wood from other sites around the world. Meanwhile, several fragments of wood raised from the early third-century B. C. Kurtoglu Burnu site during an INA coastal survey in 1985 were treated with the acetone-rosin method to determine this method's suitability for some of the smaller fragments of Uluburun wood.
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Samples of glass beads were provided to Catherine Magee, a conservation intern at the Smithsonian Institution, and to Diane Fullick at the Art Conservation Program of the University of Delaware, to experiment with a new consolidant and to investigate deterioration features of the beads. These two former INA interns are helping to develop a treatment for the hundreds of glass and faience beads from the shipwreck, as is INA staff member Wayne Smith in College Station. His experimental silicon bulking techniques have yielded outstanding results.
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Alongside and sometimes inseparable from the conservation work performed this year, many archaeology students and professionals from the Uluburun excavation team continued to catalog, study, and draw several categories of artifacts in preparation for publication. Specific conservation work associated with these activities included revealing or clarifying decorative or technological features, restoring broken fragments, identifying materials and corrosion products, and taking samples.
Also, as in past years, several visiting scholars of Late Bronze Age archaeology visited the Bodrum conservation laboratory. Various experts came to examine or study Aegean coarse-ware stirrup jars (Dr. Hal Haskell, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas), incised marks on Mycenaean and Canaanite ceramic vessels (Nicolle Hirschfeld, University of Texas at Austin), glass and faience materials (Valerie Matöian, French School of Archaeology, Damascus), cylinder seals (Dr. Dominique Collon, British Museum), glass beads and ingots (Torben Sode, Royal Collection, Copenhagen), and copper and tin objects (Drs. Noel Gale and Sophie Stos-Gale, Oxford University). Others came simply to see the assemblage from the Uluburun shipwreck and discuss its implications for the history of the Late Bronze Age. In addition to these specialists, dozens of other interested visitors were given tours of the laboratory.
It is estimated that conservation of all the Uluburun shipwreck artifacts will require
a minimum of 
five more years, provided the
work can proceed as it did in 1995. Several conservation students have applied to come to
the laboratory to provide their invaluable help in 1996 and 1997. The Turkish Ministry of
Culture and the Director of the Bodrum Museum plan to open the display of the Uluburun
finds to the public in the year 2000, in a specially designed building currently under
construction. In addition, INA and the Ministry of Culture are planning a traveling
exhibit in the U.S. of many of the Uluburun finds, to begin in 1998.
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- Laboratory Research and Analysis by Michael Fitzgerald
- The Copper Oxhide and Bun Ingots by Patricia Sibella
- Dendrochronological Dating of the Uluburun Ship
by Cemal Pulak
