Michael Katzev, 62; Led Study of Ancient Ship

Michael Lazare Katzev, classical art historian and marine archeologist who supervised the eight-year effort to raise, preserve and study the 2,300-year-old Greek merchant ship Kyrenia, one of the oldest and most intact vessels ever recovered, has died. He was 62.

Katzev, Los Angeles-born former teacher at Oberlin College and vice president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology that he helped found at Texas A&M; University, died Sept. 8 at his home on the island of Southport, Maine. The cause was a stroke, said his wife, Susan, who had assisted with the Kyrenia project.

With an economics degree from Stanford, Katzev seemed an unlikely antiquities sleuth but came to love the work. “Roughly equal to a three-martini buzz” was how he described undersea excavation to The Times in 1970.

The Kyrenia, named for the city in northern Cyprus near where it sank, was discovered by a Cypriot sponge diver in 1967. Katzev, who supervised scores of scientists, technicians and students from 12 countries in the meticulous excavation project, dived twice a day to examine the ship’s well-preserved pine planks and the cargo they bound.

Unlike hundreds of contemporary ships sunk in the Mediterranean, the little cargo ship had been quickly buried by silt and sand, sealed from harmful attack by oxygen or sea creatures. It was nearly 75% intact.

By 1969, Katzev and his team had labeled, measured, photographed, carefully dismantled and brought to the surface about 6,000 pieces of the wooden hull on metal trays buoyed by balloons.

Once reassembled, the 45-foot-long, 14-foot-wide vessel went on display in the medieval Crusader Castle of Kyrenia, in a portion of Cyprus now controlled by Turkey.

The cargo recovered included 404 terra cotta jars called amphorae from Rhodes, which had apparently held wine; 29 grain-grinding millstones from Nisyros for ballast as well as trade, and the remains of nearly 10,000 almonds. What the ship carried helped trace its route among the Greek islands, and carbon dating of the wooden hull plus five Greek coins found aboard helped determine the ship’s age.

The Kyrenia, Katzev concluded after years of study in Athens libraries and elsewhere, had been a typical coastal trader in the days of Alexander the Great, whose crew ate and slept atop the bulky cargo.

“We found four sets of domestic pottery--bowls, pitchers, drinking cups--and fragments of four wooden spoons,” Katzev said. “A captain and three sailors would be right for handling a ship of that size.”

Curiously, no personal items or bones of the crew were found. Katzev originally speculated that the ship, nearly 100 years old at the time it went down, sunk from age deterioration or a storm. The sailors, he thought, might have escaped to shore.

But further study revealed iron spearheads under the hull, and Katzev decided pirates had attacked, taken cargo and captured the crew to sell as slaves. He also concluded, citing a missing section of the hull that was probably bashed in, the pirates had scuttled the ship to cover their crime.

The Kyrenia II, a replica of the find, was built by the Hellenic Institute for the Conservation of the Naval Tradition in the early 1980s and launched in 1985 by the late actress Melina Mercouri, then Greek culture minister. The ship, under a replica single square cotton sail, later retraced its namesake’s assumed route in a study of ancient sailing.

On July 4, 1986, Katzev was aboard the Kyrenia II when, as Greece’s entry, it sailed past the Statue of Liberty in a parade of tall ships saluting the statue’s centennial.

Katzev’s work on the Kyrenia, as well as his other archeological projects, has been featured by the National Geographic, BBC and other television networks, and several newspapers and magazines around the world, as well as in the documentary “With Captain, Sailors Three.”

After Stanford, Katzev earned a master’s degree in art history from UC Berkeley, then pursued graduate work at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania.

He began to focus on original Greek bronze statues, and, deciding the best were buried at sea, studied excavation at Nemea, Greece. When not teaching, Katzev devoted his career to excavating and studying ancient Roman and Byzantine shipwrecks.

In addition to his wife of 35 years, he is survived by his brother, Richard, of Portland, Ore.

The family has asked that memorial contributions be sent to the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M; University, in care of Jerome Hall, President; P.O. Drawer HG, College Station, Texas 77841-5137.