A Sediment Archive
The Old Port of Marseille, the natural harbor once known as the Lacydon, functions as an immense archaeological repository. When Greek sailors from Phocaea established their trading post of Massalia around 600 BCE, they chose a deep, sheltered inlet perfect for commerce. Over centuries, this basin has trapped sediments from runoff and human activity, creating a thick, waterlogged environment. This anoxic mud has preserved organic materials, especially wood, with extraordinary fidelity. The result is a stratified archive of maritime history, with shipwrecks and discarded artifacts buried in chronological order.
Major excavations, particularly during the construction of the Centre Bourse shopping center and its underground parking garage at Place Jules Verne in the 1990s, have provided a record of this archive. Archaeologists uncovered remnants of Greek and Roman port structures but a stunning collection of ancient ships. At the Place Jules Verne site alone, at least seven ancient vessels were discovered, each showing shipbuilding technology from its respective era. The layers of mud preserve the history, preserving the vessels that have sunk here for more than two and a half millennia.
A Chronology in Wood
The shipwrecks of Marseille show the timeline of naval architecture. The oldest discoveries, the Jules-Verne 7 and Jules-Verne 9 wrecks, date to the second half of the 6th century BCE, around the time of the city's founding. These are not hulking warships but small commercial boats built with a "sewn-plank" technique. Instead of using nails or mortise-and-tenon joints, their planks were literally stitched together with cords made of flax or other plant fibers. This archaic construction method provides direct physical evidence of early Greek shipbuilding practices.
Higher up in the sediment layers, the technology evolves. Roman wrecks, like the large 23-meter-long merchant ship from the 3rd century CE found at the Bourse site, show advanced construction with robust mortise-and-tenon joinery. Excavations also revealed specialized Roman-era vessels, including three nearly identical hopper barges from the early 2nd century CE. These flat-bottomed boats were engineered to dredge silt from the harbor, featuring a large central cavity and likely a bottom door to dump the sludge elsewhere.
The science of dendrochronology is important for analyzing these finds. By studying the tree rings in the ships' timbers, researchers can sometimes determine the exact felling date of the wood and its geographic origin. While successfully dating Mediterranean shipwrecks this way remains challenging, the analysis of wood species—like pine, fir, and oak—reveals ancient trade routes for timber and the resource management of shipyards. Each wreck is a data point, contributing to a massive, long-term study of Mediterranean commerce, technology, and environmental change.