Event period: 2 and 3 July 2016
Something's finally turned up, man! My patience and stubbornness have finally paid off! I don’t know exactly what I’ve got my hands on, but I assure you we’re not dealing with contemporary junk anymore. Basically, I’ve come across some perfectly squared metal plates or sheets that, despite the passage of time, humidity and salinity, are quite well preserved. For a moment, I was worried that this might mean that they were not ancient, but it is no less certain that they could be made of noble metals, or of metals that in the environmental conditions of a peat bog do not suffer too much degradation[1].
Anyway, this is the first evidence of something potentially interesting. I have been doing some research on what they could be and so far, they fit well with the description of the plates that were used to cover the hulls of wooden ships to prevent them from being damaged by the shipworms and other xylophages[2]. The curious thing is that, from what little I have read about it, they usually made these plates of copper or lead, and this metal doesn’t seem to be one or the other; it’s not strange that I don’t recognise it (I mean, I know just enough about metals not to be called a fool).
In other circumstances, if this project was an official one, I would look for an expert to identify it, but since I don’t want to deal with awkward questions, I’m going to leave everything in its place so as not to decontextualize[3] it and try to outline its shape. I want to check if the plates I have in front of me were just thrown or ended up here by chance, or if, on the contrary, they indicate a sunken vessel. If the latter is the case, there should be scattered plates following an oval shape of a ship’s hull. I confess it would be weird as hell, because if the ship ran aground so close to the coast it would have been looted or scrapped by the locals or the crew themselves, but it’s not completely impossible, so we’ll have to check it out.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The important thing is that something has finally turned up, and I couldn’t be happier. I would have liked more some pre-Roman remains, as the pieces that appeared here once announced, because it would be a good example that underwater archaeology is not all about sunken ships, but, hey, I will not be the one to complain, I mean, I came looking for copper and I found gold (do you get it?). Anyway, I’ll stop now.
[1] Under normal conditions, metals that spend a long time in seawater end up oxidising and deforming, even changing colour, as with bronze, which turns a greenish colour, or iron, which takes on a brownish, blackish colour. Only noble metals such as gold and silver do not oxidise under these conditions or do so to a very limited extent.
[2] Xylophages, like the aforementioned shipworms, are living beings whose diet or life cycle involves wood or its cellulose. This behaviour makes them particularly harmful and undesirable for wooden ships that sail the seas, as they stick all over the surface that remains permanently submerged (the so-called living work), and can be a source of waterways, sinking or structural damage to the ship.
[3] With this, Enoch means he does not intend to remove the plates found from their original location, because, in archaeology, as important as the piece itself is to know where, how and in the company of what it appeared (what we normally summarise with the term “archaeological context”). Therefore, when someone removes an archaeological antiquity from its original location, they are destroying part of the information.