stane gabrovec, head of the Archaeological Department at the National Museum (1948–1988) and an eminent prehistorian, began to research late–Bronze and Iron Age sites in Slovenia in the late 1940s. He also initiated a large-scale program, documenting numbers of Slovenian sites excavated during the Austro-Hungarian period and deposited in foreign museums. In less than two decades, Gabrovec succeeded in developing the chronology and cultural-history synthesis of the Bronze and Iron Ages of Slovenia and neighboring lands, and the prehistoric collection, once again, became the pride of the museum.

Developments after 1950s reflect a gradual rise in the complexity of the museum. Its rich archaeological collections were divided into prehistoric, Roman, and early mediaeval units, with each unit having specialized curators. Peter Petru, director of the National Museum from 1970 to 1983, continued and completed the organizational structure of the museum and also contributed much to the development of Roman archaeology in the museum. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the numismatic cabinet developed into one of the major regional reference centers for Celtic and Roman coinage.

Predrag Novakovic

References

Deschmann, K. 1888. Führer durch das Krainische Landes-Museum Rudolphinum in Laibach. Ljubljana.

Gabrovec, S. 1971. “Sto petdeset let arheologije v Narodnem muzeju.” Argo 10: 35–48.

Petru, P. 1971. “Misli ob stopetdesetletnici Narodnega muzeja.” Argo 10: 3–34.

Nautical Archaeology

The term nautical archaeology, as in the archaeology of ships, comes from the Greek word for ship (naos) and is used in preference to the terms marine or underwater archaeology.

Beginnings

Interest in ships of earlier times began at least as far back as the classical period when Jason’s famed Argo was supposedly preserved and displayed at a sanctuary of Poseidon in what is now Greece near the Isthmus of Corinth. Then, as today with the U.S.S. Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) in Boston and other historic vessels, there was the philosophical question of how much wood could be replaced before the ship would no longer be considered to be its original self. Also in the classical period, an old-fashioned vessel said to be similar to the one that had carried Theseus to Crete to slay the Minotaur was sailed annually from Athens to Delos for a religious festival. In the sixth century a.d., Procopius of Caesarea recorded a description of the ship of Aeneas, founder of Rome, that was said to be on display in a specially built shed on the bank of the Tiber River in the middle of the city. A fresco of a naval procession dating from around the middle of the second millennium b.c. that was uncovered on the Aegean island of Thera shows, according to some scholars, the practice of depicting or replicating watercraft from the still more distant past.

The conservation and replication of old ships are still elements of nautical archaeology, but the actual surveying for and excavation of ships of prior ages may have begun in the Renaissance. Traditional reports of two ancient vessels in Lake Nemi, seventeen miles southeast of Rome, led to salvage attempts by the architect Leon Battista Alberti in 1446. After having the wrecks examined by breath-holding Genoese divers, Alberti tried to raise and tow one of the hulks ashore with hooks lowered from a raft of barrels. Although the attempt was unsuccessful, he did recover a statue from one wreck. His failed salvage effort was followed in 1535 by more-detailed observations and measurements made by Francesco Demarchi, who dived in perhaps the earliest recorded diving suit to take samples of the ship’s wood while wearing a wooden helmet outfitted with a small crystal viewing plate.

Nineteenth Century

Three centuries later, in 1827, the engineer Annesio Fusconi, working from an eight-seat diving bell, raised artifacts from the Lake Nemi wrecks that eventually were acquired by the Vatican Museum. However, Fusconi, too, failed to raise either of the hulls.