2023-06-11 18:00:11
There are archaeological exploration missions that are guaranteed to hit the bullseye. The one that was carried out off Tunisian territorial waters, under the aegis of Unesco, at the end of the summer of 2022 did not take long to discover three wrecks, including one probably dating from the Iis century. The chosen location, the Banc des Esquerquis, some reefs of which are exposed less than 50 centimeters from the surface, has caused shipwrecks for millennia in an area of about 30 square kilometers between Tunisia and Sicily. It had even become, since the end of the 1970s, with the democratization of diving equipment, a high place of archaeological looting in Europe.
“It was up to the first who found, because no legislation protected these remains in international waters”, recalls Michel L’Hour. Barely arrived, in 1982, at the Ministry of Culture, in the department which would become that of underwater and underwater archaeological research (Drassm), which he would direct until his retirement in 2021, he remembers having “met French divers who said they went to the Banc des Esquerquis every year to visit wrecks”.
It will therefore have taken forty years to see the first operation in which scientists and States (France, Italy, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Spain, Croatia and Egypt) come together to contribute to better protection and enhancement of the submerged underwater cultural heritage. in international waters. In 2001, however, the general assembly of Unesco adopted a convention to provide legal protection and a framework for multi-state intervention for underwater archaeological sites threatened by trawling, industrial projects or treasure hunters. . Ratified since by 72 States, it had not yet given rise to any concrete mission…
“Boat Trap”
On August 30, 2022, shortly after 5:30 a.m., Michel L’Hour just missed “a hell of a time”, teaches him on his arrival on the catwalk of theAlfred-Merlin, the brand new archaeological exploration vessel of the Drassm, Loïc Montenay, second captain. A tall ship passed straight through the stones. “Obviously, everyone was sleeping, they are miracles without even knowing it”he says.
Named after historian Alfred Merlin (1876-1965), founder of underwater archaeology, the ship is stationed near Keith Reef, where no one should go. Poorly mapped, this marine area is described in the preparatory document for the expedition as “boat trap”, due to the breaking waves generated by the sudden raising of the seabed, the east-west sea current and violent weather episodes in the Mediterranean. Approaching the most dangerous of the three rock formations that dot the Banc des Esquerquis required several preliminary passages in order to draw the relief of the massif, its bathymetry, using a multibeam sounder placed under the keel.
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