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The Excavation of a Junk of the XVth Century
In cooperation with the National Museum of the Philippines the team has started what is proving yet again, to be a fascinating archaeological underwater excavation on the sunken vestiges of a junk on the East coast of Palawan Island.
When Coast Guards reported to us that looters had been attempting to dive, our survey vessel, the 70 foot catamaran Kaimiloa, was immediately sent to secure the site of the junk, and arrived there on December 15, 1999. At this stage, to secure the site against such looting was obviously very important, especially when bad weather conditions, created by the Northeast monsoon, meant that we would not be able to start the excavation before the end of January, at the very earliest.
The mobilisation was eventually done on February 1st, 2000, on the support vessel Vasco. Vasco is a 110 foot vessel, fit for diving operations, with a capacity of 16 berths above those of the nine crew members. The Society team on board is composed of eleven people, with three representatives from the National Museum participating in the excavation, and two representatives of the Philippines� Coast Guards.
In total, there are 31 people involved in the mission, including of course C�cile, who is our representative in Manilla, and who takes care of all back up logistics.
In order to install the three 15 foot by 5 foot desalination basins necessary for treating the retrieved artifacts, we had to set up a base on land, 1.3 miles away. The base is composed of a shed where our heavy equipment has been stored, and of a big room with sleeping accommodation for the representatives of the local police, coast guards and assistants, as well as for the archaeologists and restorers working on land in case they could not come back on board because of bad weather.
The depth of the site is 100 feet, so the divers work on the bottom for 50 minutes in the morning and 50 minutes in the afternoon, using the following decompression stages:
- Morning: 20 minutes at 6 metres breathing pure oxygen.
- Afternoon: 6 minutes at 9 metres with air and 30 minutes at 6 metres with pure oxygen.
Despite the swell, strong wind and rain of the rather bad weather conditions, the work on site is progressing very well. We have already been able to judge that the vestiges appear to proceed from a junk dating back to the very end of the 15th Century, and we can assess from the style of the porcelain that she sank somewhere between the years 1480-1490.
The most significant feature of this site is the important number of superb black glaze jars from Siam that have been found. They were fabricated in the kiln sites of Sawankhalok and Tao Maenam Noi in Singburi province, at the end of the 15th Century. These jars form an impressive collection and they are associated with various other types of ceramics from Siam, Annam and China.
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