E-mail Favorite More

From the birth of civilization to the current Information Age, technology has driven the major eras in human history. Today new technologies are breaking into the last frontier on earth—the 98 percent of the deep oceans that remain unexplored. Brendan Foley '91, a research associate and the only marine archaeologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, believes this new frontier will also change history--revealing long-submerged secrets of western civilization.

Beginning in about 3100 B.C., simple farming technologies enabled the first permanent and complex settlements to flourish in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the fertile regions along the Tigres and Euphrates rivers where southwest Asia meets northeast Africa. In the Bronze Age that followed, humans learned to forge metals and build ships capable of crossing oceans and carrying the seeds of civilization to less fertile lands. Around 2000 B.C., seafaring trade reached the rocky Aegean islands and coastlines of Greece, where ancient societies would produce the great literature, philosophy, advanced mathematics and tenets of democracy that would lead to western civilization.

Yet the history of maritime trade in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas and its major role in the origins of our civilization remains a vast mystery, its clues hidden on the deep ocean floor amid the wreckage of ancient ships that once transported, along with their cargoes, new ideas, tools and cultural exchanges. These shipwrecks have eluded human inquiry for thousands of years, until now, when advanced technologies have spawned the emerging field of deep-water archaeology and opened previously inaccessible territory to a new age of discovery.

"You can think about these ancient ships as telephone lines we're able to listen in on to see who's talking to whom, because ships were not only the medium of trade, they were the medium of communication," says Foley. "Given my background, I believe in technology's ability to shape what we think. Whatever happed in the Bronze Age changed our world. I don't know what it is yet, but I do think that ancient shipwrecks can give us the answers."

Foley has a grand plan to open those lines of communication to the ancient world through the exploration of hundreds of deep-water shipwrecks from many past eras, and specifically, the discovery of rare Bronze Age vessels. He believes he and his colleagues will uncover more historical and cultural treasures than now exist in all the world's museums combined--and even more valuable insights into early western civilization.

"Terrestrial archaeology used to focus on a single site at a time, and now with satellite imagery, geographic information systems and aerial mapping, there's a trend toward landscape archaeology and trying to see the broader sweep," says Foley. "We're taking a similar approach in using deep-water technologies to survey as many shipwrecks from as many periods of time as we can. By mapping out the shipwrecks across the entire seafloor, we'll begin to see the patterns of ancient connections that were based on seaborne shipping and led to the birth of our civilization."

Foley has good reasons for high expectations. The only two Bronze Age shipwrecks recovered in the Mediterranean Sea rocked the worlds of scientists and scholars alike. Found in shallow waters off the coast of Turkey, near Gelidonya in 1954 and Uluburun in 1982, the shipwrecks were later excavated by marine researchers from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M University, and determined to originate between 1200 and 1300 B.C. in Phoenicia, the lands now known as Syria and Lebanon. The wrecks yielded an astonishing cargo with tons of well-preserved statuary, jewelry, tools and weaponry from Egypt, Cyprus and other parts of the Near East. These findings also altered history, as the Phoenicians were not known to have traded in the Aegean Sea region before 800 B.C.

But for Foley's dream of changing history to unfold, new and better technologies will not be enough. He will also need to inspire engineers and historians, oceanographers, geologists and archaeologists from around the world to work toward these same goals. He will have to convince foreign governments and scholars to share their territorial waters and historical treasures with him and his American colleagues. And he will need to find individuals and organizations to invest in an ambitious project without precedent that could take decades to complete.

Since 2003, when Foley joined Woods Hole's Deep Submergence Laboratory, he has been building the cross-disciplinary, international and political relationships needed to realize his bold vision. These efforts have already led to a promising partnership with Greece that allows joint exploration of shipwrecks in Greek waters; to expeditions in which precision technologies have surveyed deep-water shipwreck sites in hours rather than years; and to the first successful use of DNA testing to identify a 4th-century B.C. shipwreck's ancient cargo.

Foley's love of the ocean and history began in his childhood in the 17-century coastal town of Newbury, Mass. He and his friends learned to scuba-dive as teens, which opened a fascinating underwater world to them. He aspired to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., and become a career naval officer, but this dream was derailed when as a high school senior, he broke his neck in a wrestling match, which disqualified him from admission.

Disappointed and confused about his direction, Foley headed to the University of New Hampshire, where he joined a fraternity and studied history, albeit half-heartedly at first. He cites History Professor Greg McMahon as a favorite teacher with whom he took several courses and an independent study in nautical history. Professor McMahon recalls Foley as a smart, serious and often funny student who stood out in class. "As a senior he asked me to cancel the final, and I said that since college is all about acquiring knowledge and persuasive skills, if he could convince me of good reasons for canceling it, then he wouldn't need one. He didn't convince me, but he was the kind of student who had the chutzpah and sense of humor to give it a try."

While at UNH, Foley found a way to combine his two great loves through a summer field studies course led by David Switzer, a history professor at Plymouth State University. Professor Switzer led students in the excavation of a 17th-century shallop—a heavy, open vessel propelled by oars and sails and used for fishing and limited coastal trading—which was submerged at the mouth of the Piscataqua River in Portsmouth, N.H. For three summers, Foley worked with Switzer, putting his scuba-diving skills and knowledge of early American history to good use. He also acquired underwater photography skills and mastered the laborious and precise practice of mapping marine excavation sites, using poles and string to lay out watery grids. These excavations can take months, years, even decades to complete, depending on the site's size and complexity.

"Dave Switzer is the best teacher I ever had," says Foley. "He'd present the problem, and then ask, 'what do you think?' He didn't force knowledge on us, but gave us opportunities to meet our potential. Every year the field school had a plan, but we didn't stick slavishly to it, which led us in directions we never could have predicted."

By his example, Switzer inspired Foley to envision a new path for his own life. "I thought, who do I know who has the kind of lifestyle I like? It was professors like Dave Switzer, who get to be around young people and explore their areas of interest wherever, and often, whenever, they like, depending on how they structure their research."

Foley went on to pursue a Master of Arts degree in history at Tufts University, focused on the social and economic history of maritime America from 1580 to 1860. He then won a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship to attend the University of Southampton in England, where he chose the most technically intensive research track and earned a Master of Science degree in maritime archaeology.

In January 1997, Foley was hired as research assistant by David Mindell, professor of engineering systems in the Science, Technology and Society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Mindell, a historian and electrical engineer who began his career at Woods Hole, designs control, navigation and mapping systems for marine research vehicles used by Woods Hole and MIT. Foley soon joined Mindell on an expedition in the western Mediterranean Sea with a team of engineers, archaeologists and oceanographers led by Robert Ballard, who more than a decade earlier had discovered the wreck of the Titanic.

The team spent six weeks searching for and surveying shipwrecks along an ancient maritime trade route between Carthage and Rome. Aided by a U.S. Naval nuclear submarine with long-range sonar, the team quickly located eight ancient shipwrecks, its most important discovery a 2nd-century B.C. Roman sailing vessel whose remains included ceramic transport jars called amphoras that likely carried wines and oils for trade.

Returning to the Roman shipwreck on a research vessel, the team lowered Jason, a remotely operated robot equipped with Mindell's systems, via a long fiber optic tether into the water just above the site. Jason's pilot guided the robot back and forth over the wreck, in movements Foley calls "mowing the lawn," to survey the site and generate sonar and photographic images of its remains and artifacts. Using a computer on board the research vessel, Foley melded hundreds of discrete images into detailed photomosaics, which the pilot then used to guide the robot toward the artifacts and lift fragile pieces of amphoras with its mechanical arms and legs, placing them in an elevator-like device that brought them to the surface.

"It was the perfect introduction to all of this stuff and the most exciting thing happening in the field," says Foley. It also taught him something about international relations that has since served him well. Although Foley maintains that the research took place in international waters near Skerki Bank, an underwater feature off the coast of Sicily, the Italian government criticized the expedition and publicly denounced the researchers as "pirates." "We were completely legal and ethical, but it drove home to me that you can do everything legally, but perception is all that matters," he says.

Foley decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Mindell's interdisciplinary department and become a more integral part of the marine research projects underway through MIT and Woods Hole's Joint Program for graduate students, and to one day be in a position to shape the future of a new field of research. Shortly after beginning his doctoral work in fall 1997, Foley persuaded Mindell, now his dissertation advisor, of the need for a research program in deep-water archaeology. Although the new technologies developed by Mindell and his colleagues had made the practice of deep-water archaeology possible, no such field or research program to support it formally existed yet.

"That trip to Skerki Bank turned out to be a very important one, so Brendan was there at the very beginning of what we were doing," explains Mindell, who says Foley was accepted as a doctoral candidate at MIT as much for his impressive work on the expedition as for his dual background in archaeology and history. "It was clear from that expedition that even the people who were doing deep-water archaeology didn't really understand how a new field was created or what the basic parameters should be," he says. "Brendan persuaded me that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either, and he proceeded to work with me over the next seven years to build the world's first research program in deep-water archaeology. It's the sort of thing we're encouraged to do at MIT. It's one of those cases of one learning as much from the student as you teach the student."

Deep-water archaeology, as Mindell describes it, is an amalgamated discipline created by the fusion of traditional marine archaeology with engineering and oceanography. Foley defines it alternately as a humanities field of inquiry that employs rigorous scientific research methods. It differs from marine archaeology—research conducted by scuba divers on shallow underwater sites of up to 50 meters—in that deep-water shipwrecks are inherently closed to direct human contact, and the surveying of these sites must be done remotely, with technology tools.

Mindell established the MIT Deep Water Archaeology Research Group, or DeepArch, in 1998, to develop the methodologies, technologies and scientific skills for investigating shipwrecks in deep water. He and Foley, his close collaborator, conceived of the research group, like the new field itself, as necessarily interdisciplinary and international, requiring collaboration among scientists and humanities scholars, as well as strong partnerships with governments, research institutes and universities around the world.

"It didn't exist anywhere else," say Mindell of the research group, "because no one else had the ability to bridge between engineering, archaeology and oceanography."

At MIT in 1999 and 2002, DeepArch hosted the first major conferences on deep-water archaeology, drawing international participants into discussions of the field's theories and practices, as well as its ethical and legal issues. In these years, DeepArch researchers and their colleagues published papers and led or joined others' expeditions in the U.S. and abroad to test their ideas and apply their research and technologies in the field. They conducted acoustic investigations of a Civil War submarine and refined their surveying methods on an early modern wreck in the Aegean Sea and four Byzantine-era shipwrecks in the Black Sea. In short, DeepArch laid the foundation for the first ever large-scale exploration of shipwrecks on the deep ocean floor.

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."

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.

In a jointly authored paper published by Woods Hole, "Ancient DNA in Ceramic Artifacts: Determining Original Contents," Foley and Hansson described the discovery as a "powerful new tool for archaeology" which when perfected, would "allow a broad range of scholars to routinely identify the original contents of ceramic vessels and open entirely novel avenues of scientific inquiry." Since ceramic artifacts are ubiquitous on archaeological sites, they expressed hope that these tests could open new windows into ancient agricultural production and food preparation, as well as into the trade networks and economies of early civilizations. Ancient DNA evidence could one day yield new knowledge about when and where certain crops were introduced and flourished, they suggested, and lead to a better understanding of ancient climate conditions.

"The beauty of the modern molecular methods and processes we use are that whether it is salmon DNA or plant DNA, modern or ancient, DNA is always DNA, with their sequences ...that we can look for," Hansson says. Every species has a unique DNA code and in certain regions of the DNA, scientists can detect the species from trace amounts. While the ancient DNA samples were degraded and in smaller pieces than what Hansson usually analyzes, they yielded clear results.

The ancient DNA story was widely covered in the science media and some general mass media in the U.S., Sweden and Greece. Foley has since attended many conferences and delivered lectures about the research, as well as fielded inquiries from fellow researchers who would like to replicate their results. Hansson attributes her promotion in 2008 to her current position, which requires interdisciplinary research, in part to her successful role in the discovery. She has applied for a grant to support DNA testing of another 40 amphoras from the Classical Age, recovered by Greek researchers over the past half century in the Aegean and Ionian seas.

"The whole idea of publishing in the international Journal of Archaeological Science was to provide other scientists with the information about how our analyses were conducted," says Hansson. "Brendan and I will continue to work together, primarily with Greek shipwreck artifacts, but I am sure that I can be of help if shipwrecks from other parts of the Mediterranean are made available to him and me."

The olive and oregano found in one amphora generated humorous headlines in the popular media such as "Ingredients for Salad Dressing Found in 2,400-year-old Shipwreck" and also surprised historians and archaeologists. While Chios was renowned for its wines in ancient times, the island was not known to have produced and exported olive oil or used oregano as a preservative or for flavoring.

"These are the kind of wonderful serendipitous discoveries that can happen when people from different disciplines talk to each other," says Foley.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution sits at the end of a narrow peninsula, its campus an interesting mix of modern and industrial buildings and former New England-style homes. Since 1930, when the institution began its commitment to "research and higher education at the frontiers of ocean science," it has overtaken much of its namesake village's two square miles and become the largest independent ocean research center in the world.

In the foyer of Woods Hole's main building, a small group of staff and graduate students huddle around a table, where warmed-up leftovers from a holiday party have just been laid out. The receptionist breaks away to call Brendan Foley, an internationally known researcher whose name she is unfamiliar with, and within five minutes he arrives from across campus, bundled up against the December chill.

Tall and broad-shouldered, Foley, who had just turned 40, has a small shock of white in his dark cropped hair that offsets his friendly, boyish face. On the way back to his office, he stops to chat with an engineer about the research vehicle he's working on, and with a bunch of graduate students about an old boat they can have if they can just move it. He greets another colleague and pats her lovely Golden Retriever before heading up the stairs to the third floor, recently designated as the exclusive domain of Ph.D. offices. "I don't agree with that," he says without elaboration.

Since the Chios shipwreck, Foley's team and their Greek colleagues have expanded their partnership, inspecting several more recent shipwrecks and conducting field trials of new technologies. At a high point in his career, Foley is enthusiastic about his summer 2009 plans to continue research in the Aegean Sea and to work with Hansson in Sweden to hone and expand DNA testing on ancient amphoras.

He's also gained the first of several required permits to conduct an expedition in shallow waters off the coast of Egypt this fall with Emad Khahil, a former colleague from the University of Southampton who is trying to build the first marine laboratory in the Arab world in Egypt. Deep-water vehicles can explore shipwrecks at a depth of up to 6000 meters, but they work just as well in shallow waters, Foley notes, and can survey sites faster and more efficiently than scuba-diving researchers do.

"Egypt has the only natural harbor along this coastline, and there's a high probability of finding Bronze Age shipwrecks there," says Foley. "No one's ever looked. We're going to need examples of dozens or possibly hundreds of Bronze Age shipwrecks and at least a decade to get where I want us to be. It's a tall order, but you have to have lofty goals."

Yet Foley is as generous as he is ambitious, always interested in sharing his knowledge and access to the tools of technology.

"I feel like Johnny Appleseed, planting the seeds for a new age of discovery. Ultimately, I want to spread our methods, spread our technology and map the entire Mediterranean Sea. I want deep-water archaeology to make a mark and leave the tools and methods behind for the next generation of researchers," he says. "If I can do that I can be a force multiplier (an engineering term for catalyst).

Despite all the progress he and his colleagues have made in shaping and bringing credibility to the field of deep-water archaeology, Foley gracefully acknowledges his mortality and the breadth of the challenges ahead.

"I believe it's going to take 25 to 30 years before we and our colleagues overseas realize our ultimate goals, and in the end, it probably won't be us who reaches them. When people have forgotten Brendan Foley, Dimitris Kourkoumelis, Theotokis Theodoulou and Emad Khahil, the next generation of archaeologists will have the resources and knowledge to begin to discern the origins of western civilization," he says. "If that's not happening, I will have failed."

Kimberly Swick Slover is director of communications at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., and a former editor of UNH Magazine.