How a sunken trove of ceramics ushered in a new era for archaeology
Off the coast of Marseille, National Geographic Explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau hauled up thousands of ancient clay vessels—and showed what fantastic discoveries modern scuba gear made possible.
Thousands of pieces of pottery like this one—crafted in Campania, in what’s now southern Italy—filled the hold of a wrecked Greek ship. The cargo went down in the western Mediterranean around 200 B.C., only to rise again a couple of millennia later thanks to Jacques-Yves Cousteau, famed oceanographer, scuba-gear pioneer, and National Geographic Explorer. In 1952, off a French islet near Marseille, his divers launched one of the world’s first underwater excavations, and the breadth of the haul was extraordinary. Alongside more than 7,000 ceramic pieces were some 2,000 clay jugs, called amphorae, once full of wine. (They’d belonged, archaeologists later realized, to two different ships wrecked at the same site.) When Cousteau found a single jug still sealed, he had the cork scraped away and poured out what a crewmate called a “dark brown, thick, lumpy syrup.” Upon swigging the dregs of the ancient wine, Cousteau wrote, “I tasted all the mustiness and age there is in this world.”
A version of this story appears in the February 2026 issue of National Geographic magazine.
