FEATURE/Underwater Archaeologist Leads Interactive Dive in Search of Black Sea Wrecks At www.archaeology.org.

Assignment Editors, High-Tech Writers

FEATURE...

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE FEATURES)--Aug. 9, 2000

Suit up and boot up.

Armchair archaeologists can now join Kristin Romey, intrepid Associate Editor of ARCHAEOLOGY Magazine and Research Associate at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, in search of fifteenth-century Venetian shipwrecks sunk in the Black Sea. ARCHAEOLOGY Magazine's interactive online dig takes you to Novy Svet in central Crimea, Ukraine, a coastal town once known as the Soviet Riviera.

There, off Mis (Cape) Meganom, east of Sudak, the ships lie waiting to be found. Romey, alongside a team from Kyiv University's Underwater Archaeological Training and Research Center (UARTC), is investigating the ruins of a time when the Italian city-state of Venice took advantage of turmoil on the Black Sea to establish colonies along its southern coast. The Venetians funneled goods from the Silk Road to European Markets by way of their Crimean outposts, so the treasure beneath the Black Sea is a rich, international array.

This is not the first Black Sea expedition for Romey ([e-mail]), who is filing regular progress reports, accounts of dig life, and digital images at www.archaeology.org. She spent the summers of 1998 and 1999 diving on shipwrecks and submerged settlements along the Aegean coast of Turkey and the Black Sea coast of the Republic of Georgia.

As the excavation gets underway, expect a thrilling voyage of discovery. With Romey, even getting there is an adventure:

"Novy Svet is not easy to get to, especially if you're a foreigner," she writes from the field. "Having finally received my security clearance, I was eager to get to work and booked a two-hour flight from Kyiv to the Crimean capital of Simferopol. My travel plans had been communicated via multiple channels to the team in Novy Svet (telephones are not terribly common in town, and the mountains usually block most cell phone access), but after waiting outside the airport for an hour, I realized I would have to negotiate for a 70-mile cab ride to the coast. Summoning my best Tarzan Russian, I made the rounds of taxi vultures and got the best `American' price for the ride -- four times more than any self-respecting Ukrainian would spend.

Maybe it was my New York accent."

At last, she takes you along on her harrowing first dive of the season, setting a compass course to swim the perimeter of the remaining surface evidence of a thirteenth-century wreck at a depth of about 25 feet, along with part of an adjacent tenth-century wreck that lies in slightly deeper waters. "While its name may suggest otherwise, the Black Sea in this area is surprisingly clear, but breathtakingly chilly below ten feet," she writes. "We skim over the rocky bottom, examining fragments of tenth-thirteenth century amphorae and pithoi that lie among more modern debris: wine bottles, fishing weights, metal cables. I reach down to grab an interesting sherd and almost plant my hand on a local relative of the highly poisonous, well-disguised scorpionfish, whose projecting dorsal spines can quickly send a diver into shock, followed by unconsciousness and drowning. I make a mental note that they are in the neighborhood and carry on."

What will Romey's next adventure be? Stay tuned to www.archaeology.org.

Other interactive digs now underway at www.archaeology.org include:

-- Journey with Elizabeth Himelfarb ([e-mail]),

Associate Editor of ARCHAEOLOGY, to modern-day Jordan and the

lost city of Petra, once an oasis for caravans of spice

traders winding through the desert. Untangle the secrets of a

once-vibrant religion as -- alongside a team from Brown

University -- you excavate an ancient temple of the

Nabataeans, who settled at Petra more than 2,000 years ago.

-- Grab your spelunking gear and join ARCHAEOLOGY's Webmaster

Amelie Walker ([e-mail]) in the jungle of

west-central Belize, Central America. There, with

archaeologists from the University of New Hampshire, she

explores caves where Maya leaders once performed rituals

including offering their blood in sacrifice to the gods.

-- Sharpen your trowel and enter the Lott House, Brooklyn's

eighteenth-century Dutch manor, an archaeological gold mine.

The site, occupied by the same family from 1720 until the

1980s, is a microcosm of change over three centuries. With

constant updates, mystery objects, audio clips, and much more,

a team from Brooklyn College brings Colonial Brooklyn to life.

ARCHAEOLOGY Magazine, published for 52 years by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), is dedicated to bringing the excitement of worldwide archaeological discovery to the public. The AIA also publishes ARCHAEOLOGY's dig, a new archaeology magazine for kids. Additional information on ARCHAEOLOGY Magazine is available at www.archaeology.org. Additional information on ARCHAEOLOGY's dig is available at dig.archaeology.org.