Underwater Italian archaeologists have located a first or second century AD shipwreck that was carrying 3,000 clay jars filled with Roman fish sauce made by fermentation of salted fish intestines.
Fish sauce or garum may not sound appetizing to modern people, but the ancients found it delicious and ate it at banquets. It was also sold in street food stands around the Roman Empire. It was highly nutritious and was a source of what we now call monosodium glutamate, a flavor enhancer.
The archaeologists, led by Simonluca Trigona, found the ship 200 meters (656 feet) deep after fisherman dragged up fragments of amphorae in their nets in 2012 about five miles (8 kilometers) off of Alassio on Italy’s Ligurian coast.
Archaeologists knew what the amphorae had contained because the jars were of a type used only for fish sauce. But the wreck also had some jars that they believe were manufactured around the Tiber River in Rome and that may have been meant to transport wine to the Iberian Peninsula.
The ship was 25 meters long (86 feet). "She most likely sailed out of Rome along the Tiber and sank a couple of weeks later while making the return journey, weighed down by all that fish sauce," Dr. Trigona told TheLocal.it. “It's one of just five 'deep sea' Roman vessels ever to be found in the Mediterranean and the first one to be found off the coast of Liguria.”
The archaeologists did a painstaking search for the shipwreck even though the general area it went down was known. It took two years to find it.