- ROME -- The chance discovery
of a Roman "ghost fleet" buried in mud just outside Pisa has
led experts to conclude that the city was built on a lagoon much like an
early Venice.
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- Archaeologists believe that traces of a community dating
back to a pre-Roman era, a sort of "Etruscan Venice", may lie
beneath the ships.
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- The end of the lagoon civilisation may also offer clues
to the fate of modern Venice - the waterways were silted up by violent
floods over a long period.
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- "The situation in Venice is not just similar to
that of Pisa, but is practically identical," said Prof Stefano Bruni
of the University of Ferrara.
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- The find first came to light five years ago when a bulldozer
involved in work to build railway offices beside the San Rossore station
on the outskirts of Pisa came across an ancient wooden ship 30ft below
ground. A large archaeological dig which was started under Prof Bruni's
direction later found four ships dating from various Roman periods.
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- The number of vessels, which were found in remarkable
condition, rose to six, then nine, and finally 21, including what experts
believe may be a Roman warship. They date from 200BC-AD500.
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- The ships will soon be housed in a new museum in Pisa's
old shipyards, Giuliano Urbani, Italy's culture minister, announced last
week. "It will not just be a building," he said. "It will
also be a kind of historical space which will develop in tandem with the
stages of recovery and restoration of the ships."
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- The extraordinary finds have produced much new data about
Roman shipbuilding techniques, cargoes, classical trade and naval life.
Some of the ships were adapted for river and sea navigation.
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- Various archaeological teams are analysing material found,
including navigational instruments, human remains, wicker baskets, clothing,
oil lamps and scraps of leather. But equally important, the experts say,
the discovery has caused the entire geography of the area, and its relationship
with the rest of the Mediterranean, to be redefined.
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- Prof Angelo Bottini, the archeological superintendent
for Tuscany, said the digs had not brought to light the existence of a
mere port separated from the sea. Rather, they showed there had been a
"network of river and maritime landing places, in which the sea and
the rivers were in dialogue".
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- This network included lagoon islands and wetlands where
freshwater combined with salt water. "To compare Pisa and Venice is
therefore not rash," he said, "even if we must exercise caution."
The discovery of the ships had also confirmed claims by ancient sources
that before Pisa was a Roman city it had been Etruscan and Hellenic.
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- The extraordinary state of preservation of the ships
was due to what Prof Bottini called the "traumatic sequence"
of floods over the centuries after the 5th century AD. "It deposited
sand in such a violent way that it didn't have time to oxidise the wood,"
he said. But while this had preserved the ships, it also meant that the
wood, when exposed to the air, had to be re-hydrated to stop it falling
apart. The procedure was incredibly slow.
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- Once the ships were discovered, experts were able to
establish that there had been a lagoon system, thanks to investigative
work of the terrain earlier to protect the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
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- Prof Bruni said: "By re-examining aerial night photos
taken at the time with special thermal film, we realised that the River
Auser [one of Pisa's two rivers] had completely changed its course.
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- "We used the data to help reconstruct the landscape
as it would have been in Etruscan times, and found that then there was
a situation similar to Venice. Now Pisa is 10km [about six miles] from
the sea. Then, it was 3.5km, and was a delta."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/11/
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