Geologists reveal the origin of an ancient ship
8 July 2024
An interdisciplinary and international team led the investigation to find the place of origin of the Roman ship “Ilovik-Paržine 1”, wrecked in the Adriatic Sea around -150 B.C. Frédéric Quillévéré, senior lecturer at the LGL-TPE, took part in the study of the rocks in the ship’s ballast, which enabled the discovery of its construction area.
Image opposite: View of the port aft third of the ship being excavated: this is the area where most of the ballast stones were unearthed. Credits: L. Damelet, CCJ-CNRS
An interdisciplinary team, including CNRS scientists, has analyzed the ballast from the wreck of the Roman ship Ilovik-Paržine 1, found in 2016 in Paržine Bay, on the coast of the small Croatian island of Ilovik, in the Adriatic Sea. Analysis of the carbonate rocks revealed that they probably originated in the Brindisi region of Italy. This discovery suggests that the vessel was built in a shipyard in or near this ancient city. The results were published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
Between 2018 and 2022, excavations carried out by the Croatian Conservation Institute in Zagreb and the CCJ (“Adriboats” program) revealed that the ship, measuring around 21.5 meters long and 6.5 meters wide, was carrying wood and wine amphorae. Radiocarbon dating and ceramic typology established a shipwreck date between 170 and 130/120 BC.
Sedimentological, petrographic, micropalaeontological and geochemical analyses of the ballast rocks have shown that almost all of them are quartz calcarenites of Upper Pleistocene age, deposited in a coastal marine environment. A field mission to analyze Pleistocene marine formations on the Adriatic and Ionian coasts of Italy enabled direct comparison with the ballast rocks.
A) Isotopic compositions (carbon and oxygen) of carbonates from Ilovik-Paržine-1 ballast and quartz calcarenites from the Adriatic and Ionian coasts.
B) Microfacies of quartz calcarenites from the Ballast and Brindisi Basin.
Credits: Fournier et al. 2024
The highly homogeneous composition of the ship’s ballast suggests that it was permanent ballast, loaded during the ship’s construction at a shipyard in Brindisi or a nearby port. A second hypothesis would be to consider Brindisi, or a nearby port, as the ship’s permanent home port, from where the volume of ballast was adjusted before each voyage. The location of the shipwreck indicates that the vessel was probably heading for a city in the northern Adriatic, such as the important colony of Aquileia.