act-dog

From the time Honor Frost made her first amateur underwater dive in the late 1940s, she was committed to spending as much time as possible exploring. [ A ] She was, consequently, thrilled to be invited by professional divers to join the excavation of a first-century Roman shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea in 1957. But what Frost witnessed during that excavation shocked her. The team, too,²⁶ took little care with how they handled artifacts and little note of where they found them. A talented illustrator,²⁷ Frost understood that the excavation of shipwrecks would benefit from the same systematic approach used on land. She teamed up with fellow underwater explorers Peter Throckmorton and George Bass, and the field of maritime archaeology was born.

Frost made her first major discovery in 1960 with the excavation of a Bronze Age Phoenician ship that dated to 1200 BCE. The historical implications of the find were significant. Prior to the identification of the ship and its’²⁸ contents, prevailing wisdom held that Bronze Age maritime commerce was dominated exclusively by the Mycenaean Greeks. [ B ] In fact, most of them²⁹ believed that the Phoenicians didn’t sail the Mediterranean at all until the Iron Age. The work of Frost and her colleagues fundamentally changed that understanding. [ C ]

Beginning in 1971, Frost directed the excavation of a 2,200-year-old Punic (or late Phoenician) warship off the coast of Sicily. The ship, which Frost surmised may have been sunk in a battle with a Roman vessel, was the first war galley of antiquity ever discovered. The excavation³⁰ took several years. [ D ] During that time, as Frost’s team recovered³¹ artifacts from the wreck, painstakingly recording and publishing their findings along the way. When the excavation was complete, the remnants of the ship was set to be³² restored and reconstructed for display in a Sicilian museum. For Frost and the field of maritime archaeology, all at once, history was³³ being revealed and made at the same time.