At the end of the 1960s, Michael and Susan Katzev from the University of Pennsylvania Museum team located and excavated a fourth-century classical Greek ship off Kyrenia, cyprus. They advanced the field of nautical archaeology by raising and preserving, for the first time in the Mediterranean, the ship’s hull, its planks fastened with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints. The hull was then reassembled for display and study by Richard Steffy, a task that lasted into the early 1970s.

Waterlogged wood, unless properly treated, will shrink and warp out of recognition when exposed to air. The Kyrenia ship was conserved with polyethylene glycol, as had been the restored Viking ships from Roskilde Fjord, the Vasa in Sweden, and three colonial bateaux raised at the beginning of the decade from Lake George, New York.

Survey techniques also improved. Many shipwrecks in the Mediterranean were initially spotted by local sponge divers, but in 1967, sonar and underwater television were used successfully for the first time to locate an ancient wreck, later examined from the submersible Asherah, eighty-five meters deep off the coast of Turkey. In England, Alexander McKee, working with Harold Edgerton’s subbottom sonar, relocated the Mary Rose, its position having been lost after the nineteenth-century salvage of some of its cannons. Magnetometers, which detect iron, proved equally successful in searches for more modern ships, which, even if built of wood, often carried large iron objects such as cannons and anchors. Unfortunately, scuba equipment and better search techniques also caused an increase in underwater treasure hunting and the looting of wrecks in the 1960s, especially in the waters around florida and the caribbean islands.

1970s

In the 1970s, surveys and excavations of high quality were conducted around the globe, starting in 1970 in England with the discovery and excavation of a clinker-built boat of around a.d. 950 at Graveney in Kent. Beginning in 1972, archaeologists from the Western Australian Museum, led by Jeremy Greene, not only excavated, published, and restored Dutch East Indiamen from their own waters, notably the Vergulde Draeck lost in 1656 and the Batavia in 1629, but traveled farther afield to study wrecks from Kenya to Thailand. Another Dutch East Indiaman, the Amsterdam, sunk deeply in sand in 1749 just off Hastings, England, was examined and sampled by Peter Marsden after its 1969 discovery—on those few days each year when it was revealed by exceptionally low tides.

The San Esteban, one of three ships driven aground on Padre Island, Texas, by a storm in 1554, was, between 1972 and 1976, the first Spanish treasure ship excavated archaeologically. One ship had already been destroyed by dredging operations in the 1940s, and another had been partly exploited by treasure hunters in 1967 before the Texas Antiquities Committee was formed to take on the job of excavating, under Carl Clausen, and conserving, under Donny Hamilton, what remained. These events led to a state law of protection for historic shipwrecks.

Veterans of the University of Pennsylvania team founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) in 1972 and began projects on four continents. Excavation of a cargo of pottery lost around 1600 b.c. near Sheytan Deresi in Turkey was followed by the excavation of a ship sunk in the natural harbor of Serçe Limanl on the southwestern Turkish coast around a.d. 1025. The latter ship produced the largest collection of medieval Islamic glass in the world and is the earliest known example of a seagoing hull built in the frame-first manner. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, INA, with the assistance of Sub Sea Oil Services of Milan, conducted the first excavation using saturation diving of a Hellenistic wreck off the island of Lipari north of Sicily.

In North America, under the direction of David Switzer, INA undertook the excavation of two ships, one American and the other British, sunk during the War of Independence. The American privateer Defence was excavated in Penobscot Bay, Maine, by Switzer in a joint project begun in 1975 with the Maine Maritime Academy and the Maine State Museum. An INA investigation in 1976 of a British ship scuttled by General Cornwallis at Yorktown led to the proposal that such ships should be excavated within coffer dams in which the murky water of