A shipwreck dating back to the 5th and 6th centuries B.C. was discovered near Sicily along with ancient anchors made from stone and iron, Italian officials said.

The 2,500-year-old wreck was found buried beneath sand and rocks by crews working on an underwater excavation project in the waters of Santa Maria del Focallo, near Ispica at the southern tip of the Italian island, said Sicily's Superintendent of the Sea in a statement Monday.

When archaeologists unearthed the sunken ship, they discovered a hull built using an "on-the-shell" construction technique, a simplistic early shipbuilding method often traced to populations around the Mediterranean. They also found a trove of anchors several feet from the wreckage, the superintendent said, two of the anchors were made from iron and likely originated in the 7th century A.D. The other four anchors, which were made from heavy stone, probably date back to the prehistoric era.

Archaeologists created a three-dimensional model of the shipwreck and collected samples from the artifacts for analysis, hoping to understand more about the materials that compose them.

"This discovery represents an extraordinary contribution to the knowledge of the maritime history of Sicily and the Mediterranean and highlights once again the central role of the Island in the traffic and cultural exchanges of antiquity," said Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, Sicily's regional councilor for cultural heritage and Sicilian identity, in a translated statement on the shipwreck published by the University of Udine. "The wreck, dating back to a crucial period for the transition between archaic and classical Greece, is a precious piece of the submerged Sicilian cultural heritage."

The three-week excavation in Santa Maria del Focallo, which was part of the Kaukana Project, an archaeological research initiative, ended in September, but officials did not share their findings until this week. The superintendent of the sea led the initiative with archaeologists from the University of Udine, near the site of the excavation.

Those involved with the project say this wreck could potentially shine a light on an important chapter of ancient Greece, which occupied Sicily for hundreds of years until the island was taken by Rome around 200 B.C.

Massimo Capulli, a coordinator of the Kaukana Project and professor at the University of Udine, added in a separate statement released by the university that studying the wreck may help illuminate how trade happened between ancient Greeks and Carthaginians, two groups that thousands of years ago fought for control of the seas around present-day Sicily.

"We are in fact faced with material evidence of the traffic and trade of a very ancient era," Capulli said

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