The Hidden Divers, Sponge Harvesting in the Archaeological Record of the Mediterranean Basin
Authors: Emilio Rodríguez-Álvarez
DOI / Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331349701_The_Hidden_Divers_Sponge_harvesting_in_the_archaeological_record_of_the_Mediterranean_Basin
Date: None
Reading level: Intermediate
Why This Matters for Freedivers
It’s easy to think freediving is a modern “sport thing,” but this paper argues divers were essential workers in the ancient Mediterranean—supplying sponges for medicine, hygiene, pottery, and trade. It also gives you a new lens for seeing divers in history: not just heroic stories, but the everyday tools, risks, and economy that made diving matter.
Synopsis
This paper asks a surprisingly tricky question: if diving leaves almost no obvious gear behind, how can archaeologists “see” divers in the ancient world?
The author argues that divers have been largely invisible in classical archaeology—not because they didn’t matter, but because the evidence is rarely direct. Most diving tools were perishable (ropes, nets, bags), and when durable tools do survive (knives, hooks, weights), they’re often catalogued as generic fishing or farming equipment. The result is that divers show up mainly as footnotes in ancient texts, rather than as real economic agents.
To fix this, the paper proposes a different approach: treat divers as workers doing a repeatable task (not just characters in stories), and use a mix of ethnography (how traditional sponge divers work) plus “middle-range” reasoning to connect behavior to the kinds of traces it could leave behind. In practical terms, that means looking for indirect fingerprints: the widespread use of sponges in medicine and hygiene, sponge textures in wall plaster, sponge use in pottery finishing, and the supply chains that would have required trained divers to keep them going.
A big and fun part of the paper is “misread evidence hidden in plain sight.” The author revisits scenes on ancient pottery that are usually interpreted as myths (heroes fighting sea monsters) and suggests a simpler possibility: some of these scenes may actually depict real divers—complete with curved cutting tools and underwater hazards like sharks. He also discusses why certain tools might be made in bronze instead of iron (saltwater corrosion), and how small details can hint that an object’s “work life” was at sea, not on land.
The paper also reminds readers that ancient divers faced the same basic physiological stresses modern freedivers do: pressure effects, equalisation problems, bleeding, hypoxia, and risk of injury—especially when diving repeatedly as a job rather than once for a record. In the end, the message is clear: if you want to understand divers in antiquity, you have to look beyond “a diver’s mask and fins” (which didn’t exist) and instead trace the economic demand for what divers brought up from the sea—and then search the archaeological record with that demand in mind.
Abstract
The aim of this study is to enhance the visibility of divers in the archaeological record of ancient Greece. Direct evidence of diving in antiquity is rather scarce, and this has contributed to hide their presence in the scholarship, failing to recognise the important roles divers played in their communities. Although references to divers and the use of sponges have been preserved in several texts, no attempt has been made to correlate these narratives with the archaeological record. This research intends to transcend these limitations by applying a new theoretical framework derived from the principles of Middle Range Theory and Behavioural Archaeology. Their respective emphases on the importance of the ethnographic record and experimental archaeology have made it possible to reinterpret and correlate several artefacts to the work of divers in antiquity. The indirect evidence of their work, for example, in the use of sponges in arts, medicine or personal hygiene, points to an extensive use of this commodity that had to be provided by divers. This is the first step in an ongoing research aimed at providing a more accurate understanding of the important role that divers, and sponges as a commodity, played in the trade and economy of the Mediterranean in antiquity.