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Aside from its historical implications, the Chios expedition heralded a new era in Greek-American relations and a stark departure from the past, when American researchers demanded access to interesting underwater sites in Greece. Foley and his American team treated the Greeks as colleagues and equal partners.

"The way we've approached it is to make contact with colleagues in universities and ministries and asked them, 'what are your dreams? How can we achieve them together?'" says Foley. "I don't think anyone else had taken that approach. It's a good model, mutually beneficial, and scalable."

It's hard to overstate the importance of contributions from the Greek scientists and archaeologists, Foley contends. "They provided the research vessel, which would have cost $25,000 to $35,000 a day to rent, and they had the political clout to make this international project happen," he says. "And once we're on the sites, the Greek archaeologists are so experienced that they're able to make comparisons to other sites and determine the possible date ranges. They see things in the photomosaics that I don't see. So it's really fascinating to learn from them."

Theotokis Theodoulou, an archaeologist on the Chios mission and one of Foley's closest Greek colleagues, says the Greek-American partnership has resulted in "quick, cheap, safe, effective methods" for uncovering new knowledge. "From the context of intact cargoes, we gathered information about the economy, transportation, exchange of commodities, daily life and communication in general," he says. "Recording and excavation in deep waters...opens a closed window to moments, aspects and events of ancient civilizations. Both of us benefitted with the deepest knowledge of our common civilization and the chance to transfer oceanographic equipment to the service of archaeology."

Theodoulou and his fellow archaeologist, Dimitris Kourkoumelis, hope to play an ongoing role in a long-term partnership, but they reel at the scope of work ahead. "Imagine that in the Aegean Sea we have 10,000 years of navigation (to study)," Theodoulou says. "Such a task could take a whole life."

To the untrained eye, the photomosaics of the Chios shipwreck that so captivated the scholars seem a disappointing misnomer, for there is no ship, only brown silt-covered mounds through which shapes of amphoras and other unidentifiable debris are visible. Foley equates a ship's unplanned appearance on the deep ocean floor to placing a cheese crudite on a table at a crowded party of undergraduate students. "Everything organic is consumed by bacteria in the hungry ocean," he says. "But what remains is really well preserved and like an open book for researchers."

Photomosaics are the only way humans can view deep-water archaeological sites in their entirety, Foley explains, likening the cognitive process of exploring a shipwreck remotely to "climbing inside the data." When he started marine archaeology, he was scuba-diving and able to see and touch the remains at the site. At deep-water sites, he is never physically present, but rather, sitting before a computer screen aboard a vessel on the ocean's surface. "There's always some technology mediating the experience," he says. "In putting the mosaics together, I'm looking at each image, and even though I'm not inside the shipwreck, I know all its contours and where the artifacts are located and the spatial relationships between all those artifacts. It gives me some sense for the entire shipwreck."

Yet Foley acknowledges that some archaeologists are skeptical of trends in their field that would replace scholars with technology tools to conduct the research at archaeological sites. "One of the criticisms is that you can't do archaeology remotely with a robot; you have to be on site to excavate and draw out the critical information," he says. "They may have a point. But what we gain is access to a whole world of deep-water sites and ways to study them quickly and non-invasively, which bypasses a lot of ethical and political issues that traditional archaeologists encounter."

In ancient Greece, Chios was well known for its high quality wines, the best of which came from Ariusia, the mountainous northwestern region of the island. The Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder declared Chian wine the best in Greece, and claimed that Julius Caesar served it at his triumphal banquets. Beginning in about 500 B.C., Chian coins featured amphoras—the ceramic jars used to transport wine by ship—often embossed with symbols of grapes.

In 2004, a year before the Greek-American expedition surveyed the shipwreck near Chios, the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) had recovered two largely intact amphoras from the site with a robotic vehicle. DNA tests to determine the long-lost contents of these amphoras had not been done, nor had such testing ever been conducted, as far as Foley knew, on artifacts from ancient shipwrecks, perhaps because researchers had always assumed all traces of their contents would have long since washed away.

That would change based on an after-dinner conversation between Foley and his fiancee, Swedish molecular ecologist Maria Hansson, whom he met when she was a post-doctoral fellow in Woods Hole's Department of Biology from 2004 to 2006. Hansson, now an associate senior lecturer in Lund University's departments of Environmental Science and Ecology in Sweden, uses DNA testing for her research into how animals' genetic profiles influence their interactions with their environments. Hansson was surprised to learn that archaeologists did not routinely submit the ancient artifacts they recovered for DNA analyses.

In May 2006, with permissions granted by the Greek Hellenic Centre, Foley worked with Hansson to conduct genetic tests at Lund University on the interior walls of the two 2,400-year-old jars from the Chios shipwreck. Their results, first published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2008 following peer review of the data by the National Academy of Sciences, were exciting and ground-breaking—both for science and for history.

The tests revealed that it was possible to extract and identify DNA from the original content of ancient ceramic vessels, both those found underwater and at terrestrial sites. The ancient DNA from one amphora identified olive and oregano, and the other almost certainly contained mastic, a rare form of resin grown, perhaps exclusively, in ancient southern Chios, which was likely used to preserve Chian wines and possibly to give them their distinctive flavors.

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