A scientific team will disembark next Monday on the beach of La Isla to once again uncover the Phoenician ship ‘Mazarrón II’ –which is kept underwater in a ‘safe’– and check its state of conservation. As confirmed yesterday by sources from the Ministry of Culture, for three weeks, the experts will collect information on the wreck and “its immediate environment”, with special attention to the degree of “degradation and water saturation of the preserved wood”. The results will be decisive when deciding whether to remove the ship (7th and 6th centuries BC) in order to guarantee its safeguarding.
These works are contemplated in the agreement signed between said regional department and the University of Valencia. “Although the intervention is a joint and exclusive action of both parties,” according to the Ministry, three technicians from the Arqua de Cartagena (attached to the Ministry of Culture), two Italian specialists in underwater archeology and professionals from other national centers of culture will participate in the work. investigation. Notice has already been given to the Civil Guard of the Sea (it is a protected site) and to the Mazarrón Town Hall.
This first phase of the study will serve to update and complete the existing documentation on the boat, which is 8.10 meters long and has a beam of 2.25 meters. Then it will be time to interpret the data and discuss the strategy to follow to ensure its conservation. For the moment, the Minister avoids talking about the extraction of the wreck, although she recalls that the reports carried out so far recommend this alternative “to avoid irreparable damage.” In March 2021, the Ministry and the Community already agreed to the rescue of the boat and its treatment in the Arqua. And they set the date this 2023.
In the absence of making a decision, technicians consulted by this newspaper express their doubts about whether it will still be possible to get the ship out of the sea this summer, before the storm season arrives on the Mazarrón coast, starting in September. From the Ministry they insist that, “with the main objective of guaranteeing the conservation of the wreck for future generations, it is necessary to address a comprehensive project that requires a sequence of phases that, chronologically executed, will yield as a final result the commissioning availability of the international scientific community of an innovative methodology of reference in the recovery and conservation of underwater cultural heritage.
A benchmark for underwater heritage
The archaeological intervention on the Phoenician ship will become a worldwide reference document for the safeguarding of underwater heritage. So there are many expectations, and the looks, placed on this point of the coast. For the acting Minister of Culture, Marcos Ortuño, “the project, backed by Unesco, is an example of international and multidisciplinary collaboration.”
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