NARRAGANSETT, R.I. - In 1994, archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert rode around northern Turkey in a dirty white Toyota van looking for evidence of ancient civilizations around the Black Sea.

Every time he and his team would ask locals for the whereabouts of centuries-old ruins, they'd get the same response. "Everyone kept pointing us to the sea," Hiebert recalled.

Hiebert knows now why they did. After some preliminary trips, the University of Pennsylvania professor and other scientists will go on a first-ever effort to excavate ancient ships and a possible human settlement left mummified in the Black Sea's oxygen-free waters.

Scientists hope what they retrieve will help them understand vastly unknown chapters in human history, covering perhaps the Bronze Age, the Roman and Byzantine empires, and when Christianity first made inroads into Russia.

Another goal of the $5 million, two-week expedition beginning July 27 is to find evidence of a great flood about 7,500 years ago that inundated the Black Sea, turning the freshwater lake into a saltwater ocean. Some scholars have said the engulfing could be the Biblical flood of Noah. Others say the theory lacks any scientific premise and complain it could overshadow the more noteworthy experiments that will take place.

The expedition will be watched live by academics and experts worldwide who may be called upon by those on the ship to comment on any discoveries. Schoolchildren also will able to tune in, at Robert Ballard's Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Conn., and other places.

The so-called "telepresence" is the brainchild of Ballard, the underwater explorer who discovered the Titanic. He has established the Black Sea's command center at the University of Rhode Island. There, engineers will take satellite feeds from the ship, and broadcast them on a separate Internet channel.

"Exploration by its very nature means you don't know what you're going to find," the 61-year-old Ballard said. "So, in fact it's very probable you're not going to have the right mix of specialists when you make a discovery."

Ballard chose Rhode Island as the mission's nerve center because he'll chair a first-ever graduate program in oceanography and archaeology beginning in fall 2004. Ballard got his doctorate in marine geology and geophysics from the school in 1974.

The team will be working off the coast of Sinop. Scholars have determined it was a major trade hub for centuries. Scientists believe the locals transported olive oil, honey and iron in carrot-shaped shipping jars called amphorae north to Crimea in exchange for wine and other goods.

Hiebert and other archaeologists had thought the traders hugged the coast on their routes. But Ballard suggested explorers look for north-south trade lanes in the middle of the Black Sea, which would have been a direct, shorter route for the merchants. He knew the deepest waters had no oxygen, meaning any finds would be in immaculate condition.

Searchers have found four shipwreck sites in previous expeditions. One of them, dubbed "Shipwreck D," is so well-preserved in the Black Sea's anoxic waters that its hand-carved mast protruding above the seabed looks as good as new.

On this trip, archaeologists hope to get a better look at ancient shipbuilding, and if they're lucky, some cargo. The ship could contain burlap bags with grapes, a trader's lunch of lentils, or goods such as silk from Asia, said Cheryl Ward, a nautical archaeologist at Florida State University.

"It's the wood and what's inside that is a secret," said Ward, who's leading Shipwreck D's study.

At another location about 330 feet underwater, the explorers think they may have found a settlement that could be more than 7,500 years old. Scientists theorize the rectangular-shaped site was a hunter or fisherman's house on a bluff overlooking the water before the Black Sea flooded, wiping out the homestead.

Ballard and his team of engineers have built a 7-foot-tall robot named Hercules that will gingerly dig around the ruin and gather artifacts, much like an archaeologist would on land.

"If we're successful with this, we're going to change the field of archaeology," said Hiebert, the 42-year-old who's leading the settlement project. "It'll open coastlines all over the globe (to excavation)."

Scientists also are interested in the ruin, because it could finally clinch the Noah flood theory that has gained the most attention for the trip ? and the most criticism.

There's no dispute that the Black Sea was flooded when rising world sea levels caused the Mediterranean to fill the Black Sea. Prior expeditions show the flood was so monstrous it raised water levels by 511 feet, and submerged up to 60,000 square miles of land, an area the size of Georgia.

The questions are when did it happen, and how rapidly? Until recently, scholars believed the drowning occurred about 9,000 years ago and was gradual. But marine geologists Walter Pitman and William Ryan wrote in 1997 that the flood was sudden and took place about 7,150 years ago. The scientists' conclusions reinvigorated the Noah flood debate, which the Bible chronicles as a calamitous event spanning 40 days and 40 nights.

Scholars are wary of the revised theory, saying it's virtually impossible to prove an event from an ancient text. Also, some scholars note that the Bible's version has Noah living in a desert in Mesopotamia, while the pre-flood coastline of Turkey was a lush, forested area.

"It bugs me a little bit," Hiebert said, "because I like the Noah story as much as anybody. I think we shouldn't try and peg what we're doing to either prove or disprove it. We're never going to get there."

Nevertheless, even skeptics such as Hiebert acknowledge the debate has given the expedition more attention than it would have gotten otherwise.

"I wish all my classes had a million and a half people in it," he joked.

Aquabots to Explore Ancient Wreck

By Noah Shachtman

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59651,00.html

02:00 AM Jul. 17, 2003 PT

Robert Ballard found the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean floor. He rediscovered the Bismarck, the infamous Nazi battleship. He mapped the Lusitania, the sinking of which became a World War I rallying cry. And he located John F. Kennedy's boat, PT-109.

Now, Ballard is traveling to the Black Sea to investigate what may be the best-preserved ship from the ancient world ever found. He's bringing a robotic archaeologist to scour the vessel. And anyone with an Internet connection will be able to watch the $7 million, 41-day mission live.

The 1,500-year-old ship sits mast-up off the coast of Turkey, buried in Black Sea mud. What makes the craft -- unimaginatively called Wreck D -- remarkable is how intact it is. Usually, shipwrecks decompose rapidly after falling under the surface. But the main mast and stanchions of the Byzantine-era ship have remained whole, despite centuries on the sea floor.

"Most archaeological sites are sticks, stones and bones," Ballard said. "The organic content gets eaten up. And so much of our history has been created on something edible, like people or paper."

On most wrecks, said Ballard, important cultural information is missing. "Who these people traded with, what they were carrying, who they were -- all that's gone -- except on the Black Sea."

Scientists have long theorized that ships sinking to the bottom of certain seas could stay preserved for hundreds, even thousands, of years because almost no oxygen is present -- in science-speak, the site is "anoxic." The wood-boring mites that eat up most wrecks can't live in such environs.

But until Ballard's Wreck D appeared, scant evidence of such preservation existed, mostly because undersea archaeologists had concentrated their efforts in shallower coastal waters.

Right now, all but the upper extremities of the ship are immersed in mud. The task is to examine more of the vessel, and see if the ship's gear -- the rigging, the ropes, the sail, maybe even the even the wreck's cargo -- can be brought up, said mission specialist Dwight Coleman.

To clear away the muck and handle these ancients objects, Coleman and Ballard are counting on a remote-controlled robot called Hercules.

The drone is the first craft ever designed specifically for deep-water archaeology, Ballard said. It's controlled by a pilot in the Knorr, Ballard's ship on the surface. But by using special pressure-sensitive mandibles, Hercules' human operator aboard the Knorr can actually feel what the robot is grasping thousands of feet below.

Ballard has long relied on remote-piloted crafts to assist him in his expeditions. For years, most of his explorations have been conducted without a human ever traveling to the wreck. But the capabilities of the drones are limited.

"Before, all we could do is find, we couldn't excavate," Ballard said. "With a ship (like Wreck D), archaeologists would say, 'Don't you touch that, you clumsy oaf.'"

Hercules' mandibles provide the necessary sensitivity to work with such a delicate find. The robot also comes equipped with special sonar that will give scientists an ultrasound picture of what it's facing down below. That's crucial, because at great depths the sea is nearly impenetrable to the human eye.

Mission specialist LTG Jeremy Werich said data from Hercules will be piped up through a few hundred feet of fiber-optic cable to Argos, an underwater communications platform and light source dragged by the Knorr. The Argos will then transmit the information up to the surface ship.

From there, a specially designed motion-stabilized satellite dish -- capable of maintaining a constant link while its ship rolls as much as 15 degrees -- will upload the feeds back to the United States. Six streams of video, showing what's going on around the Knorr and below from the Hercules, will be sent to about a dozen key locations around the country.

The satellite streams will come at 10 to 13 megabits per second, about 20 times the rate of a cable modem. That's fast enough to allow mission specialist Dwight Coleman to return to the states for 10 days and supervise sections of the expedition from a new Innerspace center at the University of Rhode Island. It's the first time such remote supervision will be attempted.

Coleman won't be the only one able to check out what's going on. According to Richard Mavrogeanes, president of VBrick Systems, which is providing video-technology support for Ballard's crew, live video streams of the mission will be available to anyone at the 200 institutions equipped with Internet2 connectivity. People with a standard Internet connection will be able to see MPEG-4-encoded real-time footage at the mission's website, Expedition2003.

In addition to Wreck D, Ballard and his crew of 52 will examine three other Byzantine-era ships found at shallower depths near Turkey. They will look at two Phoenician shipwrecks from 750 B.C. -- the time of Homer -- in the Eastern Mediterranean. And they will look for evidence of a prehistoric civilization.

In 1999 and 2000, Ballard came upon what may be remnants of a culture nearly 7,500 years old at the bottom of the Black Sea. Evidence suggests these people survived a great flood -- maybe even the Biblical deluge of Noah, some scholars believe. The first expedition found what might be stones that served as foundations for their ancient buildings.

This time around, Ballard's team will use their robotic archaeologist to bring the stones up from the depths of the Black Sea.

Dwight Coleman and Robert Ballard are counting on a remote-controlled robot called Hercules. The first craft designed specifically for deep-water archaeology, it's controlled by a pilot in Ballard's ship on the surface. By using special pressure-sensitive mandibles, Hercules' human operator can actually feel what the robot is grasping thousands of feet below.
Photo: Institute for Exploration

The top of a 35-foot-tall mast comes into view under the bright lights of the Argos, an underwater communications platform. The mast stands upright on a wooden ship found intact 1,000 feet below the surface of the Black Sea, 1,500 years after the ship was built. Photo: National Geographic Society/Institute for Exploration

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