Ships of the ancient seas

Find sites, not museum locations

The default dataset has 339 records: nineteen reviewed highlights plus 320 background records. Four Viking highlights are ship burials; two are deliberate losses. Vasa, Mary Rose, Kronan, Gribshunden and the Bremen cog form a separate medieval/early-modern highlight collection. Skuldelev's five vessels are grouped as one find site. Mediterranean-region records include Roman-period, Greek/Hellenistic-associated and Phoenician-associated examples. The two Nemi ships form one inland Lake Nemi highlight, dated by construction/use under Caligula (37–41 CE), not by a known sinking year. Cultural labels and cargo do not establish a crew's nationality. Extra records have sparse and uneven coverage; gaps are not evidence of an absence of ships.

The 321-record Oxford-derived EMODnet subset is not the complete Oxford database. One Mazarron 1 record is replaced by the reviewed two-ship site group to avoid double counting. Unknown or unparsed dates remain explicit. The original seven later wrecks are optional, giving 346 records in the full download. All displayed coordinates are rounded for regional mapping, not independently surveyed. In particular, the optional Royal Charter point retains a known source conflict.

Sources & reuse

This data was downloaded from the EMODnet Portal. The data originator is AND-International. Original archaeological provider: University of Oxford, Oxford Roman Economy Project; Strauss, J. (2013), Shipwrecks Database v1.0. The specific EMODnet dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0. Derived records have rounded coordinates, broad date bins, classified period labels and one documented grouping replacement.

Reviewed-highlight coordinates: Wikidata, CC0, with separate ship and discovery-site records where needed. Exception: Mary Rose's find position is a Historic England protected-site centroid from the CC-BY-4.0 EMODnet distribution, credited in its card. Historical annotations are factual summaries of linked museum and archaeological histories; no article prose is bundled. The nineteen highlight images have separate, verified Commons licences, displayed credits and explicit labels for reconstructions, original remains and recovered cargo. Sepia is a display effect, not evidence that modern photographs are historical. Coastlines: Natural Earth, public domain. Local D3 renderer: BSD-3-Clause. Decorative rhumb lines are not routes; no soundings or historical political boundaries are invented.

Download all 346 records · EMODnet licence & provenance · Snapshot hashes · Preparation, limitations & AI assistance.