The oldest shipwreck's real treasure is the gunk inside its jars

Records make headlines, but do they make science? "World's oldest shipwreck" is a great line. It is also the least interesting thing about a wreck off Kekova Island in Turkey. The more promising part is the sticky, glossy film still sitting inside some of its jars.

Here is what we know. As the BBC reports, archaeologists led by Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University date the wreck to between 4,400 and 4,700 years ago, in the Early Bronze Age. The wood is gone. What remains are three stone anchors and more than 30 amphorae lying on a slope about 30 meters down. The team says the ship was around 10 meters long. Some of the jars still hold residue, and the team is now working out what it is.

The "oldest" label is shakier than it sounds

With no wood left, radiocarbon dating was off the table. The date rests on the shape of the pots: two handles, a ridge, a flat base, matched to amphorae from Egypt and the Middle East. That is a respectable method, and Öniz said "100%" about the period. But it is a stylistic dating, not a lab date on the wreck itself. The Art Newspaper notes that preliminary findings appeared in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology in July. We would still treat the crown as provisional. The previous holder, a wreck off Dokos in Greece, is about 4,200 years old, so the margin is real but not enormous.

"Oldest" also depends on what you count. The BBC points out that the oldest intact wreck, with its wood preserved, is a Black Sea ship about 2,400 years old. Kekova holds the record as a scatter of cargo, not as a ship. That is a different thing, and the headlines tend to blur it.

The residue is where the knowledge is

Now the good part. Researchers are using X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction to analyze the pottery and its contents. The candidates are olive oil, wine, tree resin, and, per The Art Newspaper, dried meat or fish. Karin Sowada of Macquarie University said she "nearly fainted" at how much residue was visible, and described it as more than spots.

If that material can be identified, we would learn what actually moved along these routes. At the moment the "olive oil or wine" story is a working hypothesis, repeated by officials. A chemical answer would turn a plausible tale into evidence. It could also tell us whether the Jordan Valley, where the clay points, was exporting food, raw materials or something we haven't thought of.

Caution: a jar's contents may not be its cargo

Sowada herself raises the best objection. The residue may come from reuse. These jars are huge, she says, and people would have emptied them on arrival and used them for years. So what survives may be a household's leftovers, not the final shipment. We think that makes the analysis more interesting, not less, because it could reveal two lives of the same pot. But it means nobody should announce "Bronze Age wine" until the chemistry is in. The results are not out yet, so any claim now is speculation.

Verdict

Enjoy the record, but don't bank on it. A better wreck will probably come along, as one has before. A well-characterized residue would stay useful, because it is direct physical evidence of what traders carried and where it came from. Öniz calls the site a source of "the first scientific evidence in the world" that maritime routes were used then. That is a strong claim and we'd hold it loosely. Watch for the lab results, not the ranking.