Schnitz, S01 und online via Zoom
Organizer:
Basler Forum für Ägyptologie
Fouilles archéologiques sous-marines de l'IEASM dans la région canopique. Alexandrie et baie d'Aboukir
The European Institute of Underwater Archaeology (Institut européen d'archéologie sous-marine, IEASM), lead by Franck Goddio, has been excavating in Egypt for more than 20 years. We are working in the Nile Delta and more precisely in Alexandria and the Abukir Bay, where we found and are exploring the antique cities of Canopus and Heracleion under the sea.
Our work is well known for its sensational finds, which have led to films and mainstream exhibitions around the world. However, the scientific work and results of our research teams are much less accessible.
I would like to give you an overview of our activities and our recent results from the point of view of conservation. I am not an Egyptologist, but rather the conservator who since the beginning has been responsible for the artefacts of this underwater excavation.
More than 100,000 artefacts have been discovered on the sites, mainly from the Ptolemaic and the Byzantine periods.
Among this abundant material, we mainly found stonework and objects in organic material, ceramic, glass and various metals. A few artifacts are made of silver, but bronze, lead and gold are more frequent. Iron objects have generally disappeared in this seawater environment.
What is unusual about these sites is that they were abandoned after various natural disasters and not reoccupied in the intervening centuries. We were therefore able to find many intact artefacts such as ritual dishes that are not so frequent in other excavations.
The corpus of artefacts mainly consists of objects but also of structures. We found several stone buildings but also some wooden structures and nearly one hundred shipwrecks.
The talk will be in French.
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