Diving Diggers

The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome have been pretty well picked over on dry land. But under the surface of the Mediterranean, says Archeologist Philippe Diole, lie untold sunken deposits of classical history and art. In a new book, 4,000 Years Under the Sea (Messner; $4.50), Diole tells how diving archeologists are just beginning to exploit the submarine digging grounds.

The Romans were reluctant seamen; whenever they could, they traveled by land over their famed roads. Their empire, nevertheless, was held together by seaborne commercial and naval power. Their predecessors--the Greeks. Phoenicians and Cretans--went down to the sea by preference. For thousands of years their galleys and potbellied cargo ships plied the Mediterranean, generally sticking close to the shore, where they often sank in shallow water. The wrecks lie there still, while bright fish swim around their leaden anchors and mollusks drill holes in marble columns packed into their holds.

Syrupy Wine. Such sites are safe from most archeologists, who are generally more learned than athletic, but Philippe Diole, director of Undersea Archeological Research for the French National Museums, is not merely learned. He is a "skin-diver," and loves nothing better than swimming under water with mask and air cylinder. Often the bottom of the sea is a desert with nothing to show that man has ever sailed over it, but sometimes an encrusted object looks somehow suspicious to Diole's well-educated eye. Diole investigates. He finds a chunk of Carrara marble or a graceful jar that was intended to carry syrupy wine to some homesick outpost near the Pillars of Hercules. Or he finds a forgotten concrete jetty built by Roman engineers to protect the harbor of a busy city that is now a fishing village.

Then through the diving digger's mind runs a torrent of history. Sometimes he knows the names of the merchant princes who shipped the jug of wine. He knows the temple, now disappeared, for which a cargo of marble columns was intended. He wonders, while the brilliant fish flutter around his head, why one Fadius Musa, a rich merchant of ancient Narbonne, loaded his ship so heavily with marble that the sea dragged it down.

Treasures in Wait. Diole believes that "the future of archeology lies in the sea." Certainly many wrecks, some of them stuffed with well-preserved art objects, await the diving diggers. Those that lie near the shore in clear water are apt to be damaged by wave action and madre growths. Those that lie deeper or near the mouths of rivers which cover them with silt are better preserved, but are also harder to find and explore. Archeologists, Diole thinks, should be taught to dive.

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