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Namibia: Quest to Solve Treasure Ship Riddle Begins
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The Namibian (Windhoek)
8 May 2008
Posted to the web 8 May 2008
Werner Menges
Windhoek
THE discovery of a treasure-laden shipwreck, estimated to be around 500 years old, in Namdeb's Mining Area 1 near Oranjemund early last month is only the first chapter in what could turn into a long slog of archaeological detective work to unravel the secrets of an ill-fated pioneer of sea travel off the Southern African coast.
The easy part of working on an archaeological site like this is the digging up of the site and recovering relevant material from it, archaeologist Dieter Noli, who played a leading part in the first examination of the wreck site in April, told The Namibian in a telephonic interview from Cape Town yesterday.
The hard work is analysing what was found at the site, he said.
That is expected to be painstaking labour that could take months before it is even known what the real significance of the discovery is, he said.
He is convinced, though, that he and his colleagues who will be helping to study the wreck and its contents will eventually be able to find out whose ship this was and what business it was on when it came to an end on that barren stretch of Namibian coastline, Noli indicated.
"We have to piece together the puzzle. It's a fascinating story," he said.
The discovery of the ship has been worldwide news, with Namdeb claiming in its announcement of the find last week that this may be the oldest sub-Saharan shipwreck ever discovered.
Noli, who has been a consultant for Namdeb on archaeological matters since 1996, said he was scheduled to return to Oranjemund yesterday to carry out further work at the site and on items that had been recovered from the site so far.
He will have to see that the material collected from the site is stored properly, photographed, cleaned, and that each item - including each of thousands of gold and silver coins - is recorded, Noli said.
The material collected from the site includes thousands of Portuguese and Spanish gold coins, Portuguese silver coins, bronze cannons, tons of copper ingots, more than 50 elephant tusks, pewter tableware and navigational instruments.
The wreck itself has been "extremely badly battered" by the sea, with little of the original structure of the ship left, Noli said.
The site near Oranjemund has in the meantime been covered with wet sand again.
The site is about six metres below sea level and is now protected by a huge sea wall constructed out of sand by Namdeb as part of its mining operations in the area.
Noli said the site contains a lot of metal, including iron concretion - formed when rusting iron combines with other matter to form a hard, concrete-like material - which can deteriorate fast when exposed to the air and oxygen after so long under the seabed.
He said covering up the wreck site is a way of preserving the site for future further examination.
ARCHAEO 'CRIME SCENE' "We're dealing with a crime story here.
The wreck is like a crime scene," Noli said.
Here, though, the role of detectives will be played by archaeologists who will have to rely on clues gathered at the scene as they set out on a quest to figure out the history and end of a ship that last sailed the seas half a millennium ago.
Examining historical records in an attempt to get clues about the origins of the ship will also form an extremely important part of the work that lies ahead, Noli said.
With it increasingly looking like the wreck is of Portuguese origin, the Portuguese government has already offered to assist in the study of the wreck and the efforts to identify the ship, Noli said.
He said the coins found at the site offer only part of the clues about the ship's origin.
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An estimated 70 per cent of the gold coins recovered so far were Spanish, with the remaining 30 per cent Portuguese coins, he said.
All of the silver coins found at the site were Portuguese, he said, adding that in a situation like this, the "small change" that were used can say more than the larger denominations of money found.
Some of the Spanish coins were minted with depictions of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I, who ruled Spain in the late 1400s and early 1500s, on one side, while some of the Portuguese coins bear references to the Portuguese King John II, Noli said.
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