Millenia-old almonds used to date ancient shipwreck

(CN) — In 1965, a diving instructor discovered a sunken ancient Greek merchant ship off the coast of northern Cyprus. The ship — the first discovery of its kind — was the center of much debate concerning when it traversed the Mediterranean.

Now, new dating techniques have helped scientists determine more precisely when the ship sunk. In a paper published in PLoS ONE on Tuesday, researchers used 2,300-year-old almonds found in the ship's ceramic jars to determine that it sunk shortly before the end of the 3rd Century B.C.

The paper, titled "A Revised Radiocarbon Calibration Curve 350-250 BCE Impacts High-Precision Dating of the Kyrenia Ship," explains how the team used radiocarbon dating on the remains of ancient almonds and a goat ankle helped narrow down the date.

It also details how the team bypassed an obstacle caused by mid-20th-century preservation techniques. Excavators used a petroleum-based compound called polyethylene glycol (PEG) to prevent the wood from decomposing after it was lifted out of the ocean.

“PEG was a standard treatment for decades," said Stuart Manning, the lead author of the paper. "The trouble is it’s a petroleum product, which means that if you’ve got PEG in the wood, you have this contamination from ancient fossil carbon that makes radiocarbon dating impossible.”

Manning, a distinguished professor of arts and sciences in classical archaeology at Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences, worked with a team at the Cornell Tree-Ring Laboratory to remove the PEG and more precisely date the ship's wood.

Through these methods, researchers determined that there is a 95% probability that the ship sunk sometime between 305-271 B.C., and a 68.3% probability that it sunk sometime between 286-272 B.C.

This puts the sinking of the Kyrenia ship right in the middle of a formative period for Hellenistic civilizations. Two of the seven wonders of the Ancient world were completed during this period: The Lighthouse of Alexandria (285 B.C.) and the Colossus of Rhodes (280 B.C.). King Pyrrhus of Eprius defeated the Romans multiple times in battle during this period, but suffered such heavy losses that the term "pyrrhic victory" is still used to describe a success that is just as disastrous as a defeat.

“Classical texts and finds at port sites already told us this era was significant for widespread maritime trade and connections all around the Mediterranean — an early period of globalization,” Manning said.

Manning said that studying the Kyrenia ship has helped researchers better understand what life was like 2,300 years ago.

"It yielded key insights into the practicalities of the earlier part of a millennium of intense maritime activity in the Mediterranean, from Greek through Late Antique times,” said Manning.

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