ZADAR, CROATIA—Total Croatia News reports that bronze trumpets made in the Dutch city of Leiden have been found in the cargo of a sixteenth-century Dutch shipwreck in the Adriatic Sea, near Croatia’s Cape Kamenjak. “The trumpets were being transported in pieces,” said Luka Bekić of Croatia’s International Centre for Underwater Archaeology. “We can see that when looking at the number of these parts, and we know that there were more than ten of them. There are only less than ten trumpets from the sixteenth century in well-known museums across the entire world,” he explained. Beads and ceramics were also recovered from the shipwreck, which was likely transporting a load of grain to Venice when it sank. The site is being recorded with photogrammetry so that a digital model of it can be made, added team member Roko Surić. The ship’s three cannon will remain on the seabed with the wreckage, but the site will be protected with a new underwater system that is being tested for the first time, the researchers concluded. To read about the discovery of the Mediterranean’s oldest hand-sewn boat off the coast of Croatia, go to “A Stitch in Time.”
