Gemma smith is grinning like a child on Christmas morning. "It could be anything!" she says as our boat speeds past the rugged grey cliffs of Antikythera, a tiny Greek island midway between the Peloponnese and Crete. We are here to explore one of the world's most famous shipwrecks, where divers once found an ancient computer. The day before, the team discovered part of a large object buried beneath a metre of sand; now they are back to find out what it is. After years of preparation, there's a feeling that today is going to be big. The ship that sank here was a hefty wooden vessel, sailing west from Asia Minor towards Rome when it smashed against the island's cliffs in the 1st century BC. It was discovered in 1900 by sponge divers, who salvaged the site under the direction of Greek archaeologists: the first scientific investigation of a shipwreck. They found bronze and marble statues, gold jewellery, ornate furniture, and gorgeous ceramics and glassware. Most intriguing was an ancient geared device - the Antikythera mechanism. Now understood to have been a clockwork computer, it was used to predict and display the movements of the sun, moon and planets in the sky (see "The solar system in a box", opposite). "It is a symbolic place," says Theotokis Theodoulou, an archaeologist at Greece's Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities. "This is the cradle of underwater archaeology."
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