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Chapter 13: Post-Excavation Research 357
Cyprus and the Levant. Bass’ study illustrates that judicious use of the limited historical record helps to explain the significance of the finds and their relevance as part of the cargo of the ship. He was able to show, among other things, an extensive Phoenician maritime activity at a time prior to that previously believed. Bass states
More significant, the excavation at Gelidonya has lead to a careful re-study of the types of objects carried onboard, and this re-study of parallel material from other sites, even without the finds at Gelidonya, would have lead to the conclusion that a great deal of commerce was in the hands of Phoenician seamen and merchants.
Without this research, it would be impossible to see the Gelidonya site in any other way than a single event in part of what must have been a complex and involved trade. The problem is that a single site may not be representative of the maritime trade at the time. Even though there was no supporting evidence from other wreck sites of the same period, the study of the comparative material led to the above conclusions. Thus we may see that even though the Eastern Mediterranean has only a limited written history, the material from the site provoked further research allowing new conclusions to be drawn. Interestingly, Bass et al. (1984) have now discov- ered and excavated a much larger Bronze Age site at Ulubrunu (Figure 13.1) and it will be fascinating to compare the Gelidonya findings with this.
The second time span that will be discussed here, the period of the VOC trade, illustrates a very different situation from George Bass’ discovery. For example, the quantity of historical or archival material related to the VOC shipwrecks often outweighs the archaeological material. The extremely rich source of documentary evidence presents the archaeologist with an unusual dilemma, one which is outside the normal experience of either maritime or terrestrial archaeology. Without historical documentation, artifacts from a wreck site can usually be identified only at a relatively simple descriptive level, for example, “this object is a wood saw.” Where detailed historical records exist, such as in the case of the VOC wreck sites, the problem is that the written records describe such objects as being used in a number of different contexts. It is possible that the archaeological record may help to determine its purpose on the ship through the association of the item with other objects on the site. The archaeological objective is to interpret this sort of information so it is important for the practitioner to be familiar with the archival information, in this case the source material in Algemeen Rijksarchief, and to be able to read the necessary manuscripts.
A number of different approaches have been adopted by authors wishing to classify material from the excavation of VOC ships (see, for example,