The coast of Ronneby, Sweden, where the Gribshund ship wreck lies. Source: Jacek Lesniowski, Wikimedia Commons
Archaeologists have found a number of well-preserved, 500-year-old spices in the wreck of a royal ship off in the Baltic Sea, off the coast of Sweden.
The spices, including peppercorns, saffron, and ginger, were found preserved in jars of water.
The ship, known as the Gribshund, allegedly caught fire and sunk back in 1495 off the coast of Ronneby, when its owner, King Hans of Denmark and Norway, attended a political meeting in Sweden.
The wreck was then rediscovered by sports divers in the 1960s and has been further explored in recent years. Previous excavations of the ship uncovered large items, such as figureheads and timber. Now, Brendan Foley, an archaeological scientist at Lund University, has led an excavation and found the spices buried in silt at the bottom of the ship.
“The Baltic is strange – it’s low oxygen, low temperature, low salinity, so many organic things are well preserved in the Baltic where they wouldn’t be well preserved elsewhere in the world ocean system,” Foley said. “But to find spices like this is quite extraordinary.”
When the ship sunk in 1495, spices were a sign of wealth and high status as they were imported from outside of Europe, so they would have most likely been the property of King Hans on his journey to Sweden.
Mikael Larsson, one of the Lund University Researchers, said, “This is the only archaeological context where we’ve found saffron. So it’s very unique and it’s very special.”
