In 1961, the Vasa came to light for the first time since its loss more than three centuries earlier. Following the ship’s discovery in 1956, Swedish navy helmet divers spent three years digging tunnels under the ship and then passing through them huge steel cables that were attached to lifting pontoons on the surface. In a series of slow and deliberate moves, the pontoons were partially filled with water, the cables tightened, the pontoons pumped dry, and the Vasa brought ever closer to shore and the surface.

In Denmark, Ole Crumlin-Pedersen and Olaf Olesen had a coffer dam built in 1962 around five Viking ships sunk around a.d. 1000 to block part of the Roskilde Fjord. After water was pumped from the coffers, excavators could uncover and disassemble the ships by working from scaffolding placed over the mud. Peter Marsden used the same method to study a Roman ship found in 1962 in the Thames in London. In the same year, a fourteenth-century cog, or trading ship, was discovered during dredging operations in the harbor at Bremen, Germany.

Building on the experience of French and Italian pioneers, divers in 1960, working on a Bronze Age shipwreck twenty-seven meters deep near Cape Gelidonya, turkey, carried to completion for the first time the excavation of an ancient shipwreck on the seabed. It was also the first time that an excavation was directed by a diving archaeologist. Almost none of the hull had been preserved, but brushwood dunnage under part of a ton of metal cargo explained an ambiguous passage in Homer’s Odyssey. The ship’s large stone anchor, of Syro-Palestinian or Cypriot type, was found during a return to the site in 1994.

The Cape Gelidonya wreck had been discovered by Turkish sponge divers who guided the amateur archaeologist Peter Throckmorton to it, and it was excavated by a university of pennsylvania museum team. Throughout the remainder of the 1960s, the Pennsylvania group introduced new techniques of underwater survey and excavation while excavating two Byzantine shipwrecks off the coast of Turkey, also found by Throckmorton through interviews with Turkish sponge divers, off Yasslada near Bodrum.

The new techniques included using plane tables, metal grids with photo towers, and stereophotography to map sites; a submersible decompression chamber; the use of pure oxygen for routine decompression; an air-filled clear-plastic hemisphere that acted both as an on-site underwater telephone booth and as a refuge for divers in distress; and, as an underwater command center, a specially built two-person submersible, the Asherah, which was also used for taking underwater stereophotographs. Core samplers, metal detectors, and the normal array of lifting balloons and airlifts also came into play. From the resultant detailed site plans, Frederick van Doorninck was able to reconstruct the ships’ hulls accurately on paper, providing information from which J. Richard Steffy could build a series of research models.

The middle 1960s saw continuing work in italy. The amateur archaeologist Enrico Scandurra discovered and mapped a fifteenth-century Venetian galley that was part of a fleet moved over the mountains to Lake Garda, a feat requiring not only oars and sails but winches and as many as 2,000 oxen. The German Gerhard Kapitän and an Englishman, A.J. Parker, explored many wrecks around Sicily, including one at Marzamemi that carried the stone elements of a Byzantine church.

The 1967 discovery of an immense Roman amphora carrier at Madrague de Giens near Toulon in southern France led to a textbook excavation under the direction of Patrice Pomey and André Tchernia. The following year, Sidney Wignall and Colin Martin found in Blasket Sound, Ireland, the first of three Spanish Armada wrecks that would be studied by Martin, who worked at the Institute of Maritime Archaeology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

In the 1960s, conservation was given an increasingly important role in ship excavation. Iron, for example, eventually corrodes and disappears in seawater, usually after becoming encrusted with a seabed concretion of calcium carbonate. Accurate casts of the original iron objects can be made by pouring plaster or, far better, liquid epoxy into the natural molds formed when the iron disappears and the calcium carbonate concretion remains.