Spanish police seize looted amphorae (pay attention, there will be a test)

From TypicallySpanish comes the news that two men have been arrested in connection with some 1st century amphorae which may have come from the Bou Ferrer wreck off the Costa del Sol.

The looted amphorae. Photo Guardia Civil.

If you’re like me you might have a vague idea you’ve heard of Bou Ferrer, but can’t remember where. That’s because it’s not been widely reported in the English-speaking world. Spanish weblog Terrae Antiquae had the details back in November 2006. The Bou Ferrer, named after a diver who worked on the wreck is potentially hugely exciting. It’s big, 30 metres long, carrying 400 tonnes of freight. It’s also extremely well preserved. It’s embedded in the seabed which means the timbers have survived in excellent condition. So far forty amphorae containing garum, a sauce made from rotting fish guts, have been recovered. There’s about 1200 amphorae on the wreck.

Informacion.es says the amphorae were recovered after they heard a man had a collection of amphorae from various eras including some from the Bou Ferrer. After hearing this they chased round various antiquities dealers. The typical plan is to shuffle round the artefacts until they get convincingly lost. Then you turn up with them at an auction house calling them “Property of a European collector”. Trading artefacts found after 1970 is a problem due to UNESCO conventions targetting the trade in illicit antiquities, but simply saying they’re part of an old collection is good enough for a lot of dealers. They may well check on the Art Loss Register, but given that the amphorae have been recently lifted from the seabed they won’t appear on that. This is why it was imperative that the Guardia Civil hit when they did because if they’d tried following them through the twisty-turny dealing that make up the antiquities market there’s a good chance they’d lose them.

To be honest I have trouble seeing them as art. They’re pretty ugly looking and I can’t imagine they’ll look that much more sexy when they get cleaned up. So why are they important? Well, they’re clearly of Dressel type mumble mumble. I don’t know much about amphorae shapes, but there are plenty of people who do. They’re categorised by their profile, known as their Dressel type after Heinrich Dressel who categorised various shapes of amphora and then worked out which shapes were popular when. A large number of amphorae gives you a large sample size and gives you a good chance of putting a date on the shipwreck.

It’s also important that the wreck is excavated properly because there’s a lot of other information there which looters wouldn’t be interested in. For instance ships commonly carried things like roof tile as ballast. Or did they? Recent work by Phil Mills suggests that a simple tile=ballast approach is naïve and that actually people were shipping tile because it had value, rather than just because it made the ship more stable at sea. If that’s the case the ballast in this ship might be interesting. It lies on the route from southern Spain to Rome. Was it just garum that the Romans wanted? What else is in the wreck? If it’s not valuable then there’s a good chance it’ll be lost if looters turn over the ship. The seizure is great news.

…and as I said there’ll be a test. Find out which museum fails it tomorrow.