Phoenician Shipwrecks of Mazarrón

Every anchor found before this one was just a heavy stone with a hole drilled through it. The anchor recovered from this 2,600-year-old shipwreck is different — a genuine engineered object of wood and lead — making it the earliest true anchor ever discovered anywhere in the Mediterranean.

Sewn together, not just built

Two small cargo vessels, found close together off Playa de la Isla, have quietly become some of the most important sources anywhere for understanding early Mediterranean shipbuilding. Mazarrón II, the more complete of the two, survives to 8.1 metres long — a genuinely intact hull, with its original carpentry still readable after millennia underwater. What makes both ships technically remarkable is their construction method: builders combined pegged mortise-and-tenon joints with sewn seams, literally stitching esparto-grass cord through holes in the hull planking to bind the structure together, then coating the interior in resin for waterproofing. It’s a hybrid technique that has left researchers genuinely divided — some evidence points to standard Phoenician practice, while other details suggest local Iberian builders adapting Phoenician ideas into a tradition of their own, blurring a line historians once assumed was clear.

An anchor ahead of its time

Mazarrón II’s anchor, found largely intact near the ship’s bow, represents a genuine technological leap. Rather than the crude stone-with-a-hole design used for centuries before it, this anchor has two wooden palms, a wooden shank, and a stock filled with lead for weight — a genuinely engineered piece of equipment, connected to the ship by esparto rope. It stands as the earliest known example of a true anchor recovered anywhere in the Mediterranean, a small but genuinely significant marker in the history of seafaring technology.

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