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Dan Davis
You never see this on any other shipwreck, ever.
It was a magical moment.
Usually we're working with fragments of wood that we're trying to piece together and make sense of. Well, we got the whole ship with this one.
Shallow water archeology has been going on for about 50 years now.
Now we're finally able to get into the basement of the sea and look and see what's there, so we're at the cutting edge.
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I got to know Bob Ballard first by reading his books. He wrote books on the Titanic, on the Bismarck, on the Yorktown.
And I always loved diving. I love undersea research.
But I never pictured myself working alongside this man, who had made such quantum leaps in global exploration.
Joseph Carter
And his suggestion was a sort of joint project, and we said, "Well, we have somebody who might be able to help you."
Dan Davis
But once he finds them, he's not equipped to explain their cultural context.
So I was able to bring my expertise in shipwreck archeology to bear on the project.
So when he finds a shipwreck, great. What do we do next?
Now it's up to the archeologist, working with him directly, to figure out what it all means.
What age it is? Where it came from? Where it was going? Who were the people who sailed it? And what was the cargo that it was carrying?
Thomas Garza
And it's this particular region, for centuries as well, that has really made the Black Sea a kind of nexus, a crossroads of linguistic movement, of cultural movement, and especially of trade movement throughout the centuries.
Joseph Carter
Dan Davis
How do we make sense of them? Why are they there? We have all of these questions to ask now that we had never been able to ask before.
Thomas Garza
largely because it also housed the Black Sea Flotilla, the Black Sea Navy of the Soviet Union, one of the largest naval populations in the entire world at the time. And as a result, there was a great deal of secrecy.
Most of the points around the Crimean Peninsula were considered to be off-limits to any Westerners at all, especially Western journalists, Western researchers. So as a result, doing any kind of research in the region was pretty much off-limits.
Joseph Carter
We didn't have a lot of contact, but we had similar interests. And so when the walls fell in Berlin and elsewhere, there was a rush to get to know each other.
Thomas Garza
by 1993 we see the region of the Black Sea, because it borders on the new republics of Russia and Ukraine, really starting to divide itself up.
The new administration of Ukraine now is willing to open this area up, and this is the first time U.S. explorers, other Westerners are getting access to some of the amazing finds that are almost certainly at the bottom of the Black Sea.
Joseph Carter
The ships stay intact. The cargo stay intact.
Below 200 meters, things don't decay. It's known as an anoxic or anaerobic environment.
Dan Davis
That means that nothing lives, and since nothing lives, there's nothing there to eat the organic remains of shipwrecks.
As a result of that, [there] are shipwrecks that are completely there.
They're not just fragments that have been eaten away by all these sea worms. They're all there. They're still intact.
Now we know that the basement of the Black Sea is completely filled with wrecks that are completely preserved.
For me, it's just one of the most exciting times in my life.
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