16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

53 Zadar, Croatia | 26 September – 1 October 2021 Dragomir Garbov Centre for Underwater Archaeology, Sozopol, Bulgaria A nearly intact bombarde from the Western Black Sea Due to the paucity of source material and therefore scholarly interest, the nauti- cal archaeology of the Western Black Sea in the Golden Age of Sail is still poorly understood. Only lately did this status quo begin to change as more and more ar- chaeological evidence is coming to light, sparking focused research on the various topics defining this age of maritime globalisation. One of the most potent of these topics is the profound change in local maritime culture and seafaring practice in- duced by the gradual re-admittance of European mariners into this remotest and most conservative part of the Mediterranean World. While it is still too early to address the topic in full, studying individual channels of influence in the form of archaeological remains of European sailing ships, has strong potential for building up the empirical database required for future studies. The proposed paper will discuss ongoing work on a nearly intact shipwreck identified and recorded by the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project. The site lies on Bulgaria’s continental shelf on the verge of the anoxic zone. It represents the extraordinarily well preserved coherent remains of a 22-metre-long wooden sailing ship. The evidence for the hull and the particular style of polacre-ketch rig allow for interpreting the site as an early 19 th century bombarde of potentially Provencal origin. One of the work horses of the Western Mediterranean, in the late 18 th and 19 th centuries bombardes were built in the hundreds. Owned and sailed by Mar- seille merchants, such vessels would have appeared on the Black Sea as early as 1788 raising a Russian flag. For a discrete period they would have been a regular sight along the Western Black Sea coast, carrying apart from their valuable car- goes the deeper meaning of a symbol of change. To the knowledge of this author the shipwreck to be discussed in the proposed paper is the only example of its kind in the archaeological record to date.