464 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



fixed distance above the wreck. The resultant series of photographs 

 were enlarged to a set scale and glued together to form montages 

 showing the entire site. 



Such work was exceedingly slow. The jumble of wood that had 

 been crushed beneath the cargo was the only well-preserved portion 

 of the ship's hull. Although this covered an area of little more than 

 a square meter, it took the entire team of divers 3 weeks to cut behind 

 the solid rock on which it rested so that the wood fragments could be 

 raised together and studied on land. 



These framents matched the elements used by Odysseus in making 

 a small boat (not, it would seem, a raft) with the aid of Calypso 

 {Odyssey 5.233-2G1). There were planks with bored holes and 

 dowels, and at least two of the planks were joined together at their 

 ends. On board, perhaps only as part of the cargo, were the main 

 tools used by Odysseus : axes and adzes. Homer also tells how Odys- 

 seus made a wattle fence around his ship to keep out the waves, and 

 then "spread out a great deal of brushwood." Because this last phrase 

 has made little sense to classical scholars, it has been variously trans- 

 lated and interpreted as a brushwood bed, as part of the wattle fence 

 or a backing for it, and even as ballast. It w^ould now seem that a lit- 

 eral translation of the passage is all that is needed. Over the planks 

 of the Gelidonya wreck was spread a layer of brushwood, with the 

 bark still well preserved, which served as a cushion between the heavy 

 metal cargo and the thin hull planks. 



Not enough wood was preserved to give an accurate idea of the size 

 of the ship, but the distribution of the cargo suggests a length of not 

 much more than 8 or 9 meters. This would easily have handled the 

 cargo and ballast stones that were collected from the site. The cargo 

 was almost completely of metal. More than a ton of copper and 

 bronze objects was preserved, making this by far the largest hoard of 

 such implements yet found by preclassical archeologists. 



Forty ingots of almost pure copper, in the so-called "oxhide" shape 

 and averaging 45 pounds apiece in weight, were found piled neatly on 

 the site. Traces of matting indicate that these may have been wrapped 

 together in small stacks. Over 90 of these ingots had been known pre- 

 viously from the Late Bronze Age, appearing in Cyprus, Crete, 

 Greece, and Sardinia, and many numismatists considered them a pre- 

 monetary form of currency. Their superficial resemblance to dried 

 oxhides had even led to the conclusion that one ingot was worth 

 one ox. Careful study of the Gelidonya group, however, has revealed 

 that the ingots were merely convenient forms for transporting raw 

 copper. They have no standard weight (variations in weight among 

 those from different sites had been attributed by some archeologists 

 to local standards in use), and their resemblance to dried skins has 

 been shown to be completely fortuitous. Their "legs," previously 



