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Foley earned his Ph.D. in the history and archaeology of technology at MIT in 2003 and moved on to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod to continue his research as a post-doctoral fellow. In a sense, he simply took DeepArch with him and accepted the mantle of leadership in the field from Mindell, who could now turn more attention to his other projects, graduate students and research groups.

"We built this vision of where this field could go, and partly when he graduated, I turned it over to Brendan," says Mindell. "We were able to convince Woods Hole that he was the guy to build an archaeological research program there. Woods Hole was so exclusively focused on the technology and the science of the ocean that they were not studying the human uses of the ocean--even though that's critical and the thing people are most interested in," he adds, recalling the sensation created by the Titanic wreck's discovery.

"Woods Hole has the right combination of science background and academic standing, plus the access to the ocean, so it's the right place for it, and Brendan's the kind of person it takes to make it happen," Mindell continues. "He's into medieval ships and ancient ships and modern ships and just loves the undersea realm. He's also got great interpersonal skills and is very good at making new connections and keeping up with people. So since about 2004, he's been the leader and I've been the advisor and a helper. Before that it was kind of the other way around."

Foley would have to create a new role for himself that was equal to his ambition. "What I wanted to do there were no professorships for. It would involve building relationships, developing technological tools and methods and taking these capabilities and scientific knowledge and applying them to archaeology," he says.

Around this time, Foley and Mindell traveled to Crete, where they met with archaeologists from the Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, part of the Greek Ministry of Culture, to discuss future collaborations. Both men knew partnerships with Greece were vital to finding ancient shipwrecks and understanding the networks of maritime trade and the nautical technologies that had linked the once disparate cultures that evolved into western civilization. They were also well aware that laws governing Greek antiquities had made it notoriously difficult to gain permissions to do research in Greek waters. Their conversations revealed that the Ministry of Culture had already used sonar scans to locate some 250 shipwrecks in Greek waters. But with just 10 or 12 archaeologists on staff, the government agency lacked the technical tools and expertise or sufficient funding to explore and document most of them.

Truly, Crete was an ideal place to contemplate the historical treasures that could lay buried at the bottom of the sea. The island, the second largest in the Mediterranean, was once home to two of the most highly evolved trading cultures in the region's Bronze Age, the Minoans and the Myceneans. These prosperous cultures were known as much for their exquisite architecture and fine art as for their far-reaching systems of trade. Crete stood at the nexus of Europe, Asia and Africa, and beginning in about 2700 B.C., Minoan society evolved there as a racially diverse and mobile culture until its sudden collapse around 1400 B.C. The war-like Myceneans, whose advanced culture dominated parts of mainland Greece and the Aegean islands from around 1600 and 1100 B.C., expanded into Crete around 1400 B.C. Like the end of Minoan society, the Mycenean collapse came swiftly and remains largely a mystery. Foley and Mindell hoped a Greek-American partnership would resolve the questions swirling around these influential civilizations, their uses of technology and the nature of their commerce, as well as their inexplicable rise and fall.

In subsequent visits to Greece, Foley and Mindell agreed to an experimental joint expedition with the Greeks to explore a late Classical-era (4th-century B.C.) shipwreck near the Greek island of Chios in the eastern Aegean Sea. This ship had been built in one of human history's most productive eras, when the Greeks formed the first democratic governments, explored advanced concepts in mathematics and philosophy, and made magnificent contributions to the arts. When the ship went down, likely due to a storm or a fire on board, Foley speculates that Plato may have still lived in Athens, perhaps still grieving the loss of his mentor, Socrates.

The expedition's goals, beyond shedding light on critical junctures in human history, were to build a solid international partnership among the participants and test how well the Americans' advanced technologies could meet the team's archaeological objectives. Foley went to work on assembling the right team of experts, raising nearly $100,000, and arranging the transport of vehicles and equipment from Woods Hole to Greece.

In July 2005, Foley led the Chios expedition aboard the Greek research vessel Aegaeo with a team of colleagues from Woods Hole, MIT and other institutions, along with scientists from the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, who operated the vessel, and archaeologists from the Greek Ministry of Culture. The Americans brought SeaBED, an autonomous underwater vehicle equipped with surveying and imaging technologies that Woods Hole and MIT had refined over the previous eight years, and plunged it down 70 meters to the shipwreck site.

In three hours of slow but exacting back-and-forth movements, SeaBED created three-dimensional maps of the site with precision sonar, snapped more than 7000 photographs, and collected chemical samples of artifacts and water at and around the site. Meanwhile the team analyzed the data while Foley constructed the first detailed slices of photomosaics. The rest of the international team, many shipwreck veterans among them, hovered over the emerging data in states of mind ranging from mild shock to rational exuberance. Late in the night the crew headed up to Aegaeo's deck, where they passed around bottles of ouzo and raised a toast beneath the starry sky to SeaBED and each other for collecting nearly a decade's worth of archaeological data in a single day.

"In 22 hours we completely surveyed the shipwreck," says Foley. "It was beyond our best case scenario."

The data soon revealed a 20-meter-long, six-meter-wide merchant vessel, dated around 350 B.C., which had departed from Chios or a nearby island with a crew of perhaps four or five men. The ship was on a trade mission, perhaps headed toward the Black Sea, with hundreds or even a 1000 amphoras tightly packed in its hull. This wreck added another piece to the puzzle of early trading networks between Greece and other parts of the world. Even more importantly, the expedition spiked expectations for what scientists, archaeologists and other scholars could achieve together with the best technology.

"We're not looking for footnotes any more. We're looking to write new chapters," Foley boldly told the MIT News Office. "This is real research--slow, serious, scientifically rigorous and painstaking work. It will go in strange directions, produce ambiguous results along the way and raise a lot of new questions, but we're convinced that in 10 or 15 years, we will change history."

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