The Mediterranean yields a vessel sunk perhaps 3,400 years ago
"Metal biscuits with ears."
That surreal image, which might have come from a Magritte painting, was how a young Turkish sponge diver from a small Mediterranean village described some curious objects he had spotted lying near a sunken shipwreck. When George Bass, a nautical archaeologist who had been rummaging around the floors of the Mediterranean coast for 25 years, heard that description in the summer of 1982, he thought-he hoped-that he might be on to something.
That something turned out to be the earliest intact shipwreck ever recovered, a fully laden cargo vessel that...