Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology

The Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology (OCMA) is a specialist research group within the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford in England.

Established in 2003 with the ongoing support of the Hilti Foundation, the OCMA is devoted to the study of people who live or work on and around water. The centre offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses in maritime archaeology and fosters research that ranges from the Mediterranean and its surrounding seas and oceans to the maritime cultures and peoples of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea from antiquity to the early modern period. In Egypt, the OCMA collaborates on field projects implemented by the Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM), under the direction of Franck Goddio. In 2011, OCMA began the excavation of shipwreck 43 in Aboukir Bay and the centre is also involved in work in Libya. Its research is disseminated through a vigorous programme of international conferences and in-house monograph publication.

The Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology offers post-graduate courses in maritime archaeology and provides post-graduate supervision within the School of Archaeology and the Faculty of Classics. The Hilti Foundation funds two postgraduate studentships into research relating to IEASM excavations in ancient Heracleion. Current post-graduates research includes the Byzantine harbours in Greece and Spain, and the maritime archaeology of the Philippines, Korea and Cambodia. An option in Mediterranean maritime archaeology is also available to undergraduates.

The Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology is actively engaged in fieldwork as part of its on-going research strategy. It also offers training opportunities in field methods for its students.

OCMA is currently excavating shipwreck 43, one of 67 ancient ships so-far recorded by IEASM under Franck Goddio. Tentatively dated to between 785-481 cal BC, the vessel has a distinctive form of naval architecture that has not been fully documented elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean. This involved the use of long tenons that were initially fitted into mortice holes that passed through the keel plank over which multiple lines of planking were added, pegged into place with wooden treenails. From the albeit limited excavations, there do not appear to be any frames and consequently the long tenons may have provided the structural stability of the vessel through a kind of ‘internal framework’. As the structural elements of the wreck were made from the locally-available wood Acacia Totilis/Radiana, it is thought that shipwreck 43 was Egyptian in origin and thus probably involves a shipbuilding tradition that developed in accordance with the availability of local supplies of timber and the realities of nautical life at the margins of the Nile Delta.

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