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Roman Empire and their ancient trading partners in Africa, India, and China. It’s a theory that gives Mediterranean and indigenous African civilizations a far greater role in the southern monsoon trade than previously suspected. “The question we can’t yet answer is exactly when and from where those original voyages started, which is tied to many big questions about human migration and the ecological changes it causes,” Buxton says. “One mystery we’d like to solve is the location of the ancient port of Rhapta, the legendary furthest outpost of Roman trade in Africa.” Buxton studied evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew how to harness the southern monsoons to cross the Indian Ocean from East Africa, the route that Arab seafarers later revealed to Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in the 15 th century. Proving that the Romans were sailing directly from Tanzania to Sri Lanka would require BUXTON IS THE FIRST ARCHAEOLOGIST TO BE GRANTED A PERMIT TO EXPLORE THE TERRITORY’S UNINHABITED ISLANDS. finding an ancient shipwreck literally caught in the act of a trans-oceanic voyage. Rather than attempting to search the depths of the 27 million square mile Indian Ocean, Buxton focused on the Chagos Archipelago, which early Portuguese mariners had identified as a major navigational hazard on the sub equatorial crossing. Even then, the potential search area of over 60 islands and reefs spread over a 5,000-square-mile marine reserve seemed impossibly large. Fortunately, new research into rat genetics led by Biological Sciences Associate Professor Jason-Munshi South at Fordham University in New York provided a solution. Researchers at Fordham had recently been able to determine the date that rats, the ultimate shipwreck survivors, arrived on remote islands by studying their DNA. If the rat population on any of the Chagos Islands pre-dated the establishment of French plantations in the late 18 th century, that island would be a good place to search for ancient shipwrecks.

BUXTON THEORIZED THAT THE CHAGOS RATS HAD ARRIVED ON THE ISLANDS LONG BEFORE THEIR DISCOVERY BY EUROPEANS IN THE 16TH CENTURY.

Captain John Potter and Caroline Durville are going into a lagoon to get eDNA samples.

EXPLORING CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO OF THE BRITISH INDIAN OCEAN TERRITORY.

Professor Bridget Buxton conducts research setting rat traps in the island jungle.

“To get this particular grant, you basically have to prove that your idea is so crazy it would never get funding from anywhere else.” - Bridget Buxton

Foundation High-Risk Research in Biological Anthropology and Archaeology grant (NSF-HRRBAA) to pay for the analysis of Chagos rat tail samples. “To get this particular grant, you basically have to prove that your idea is so crazy it would never get funding from anywhere else,” Buxton says. The rest of the expedition was privately funded through OceanGate Foundation and received helpful support from the Chagos Conservation Trust and the Zoological Society of London, a former BIOT governor, and Chagos expert Dan Urish, a URI emeritus professor of engineering. Such an unconventional expedition required an unconventional research vessel to access the most remote and uncharted reaches of the archipelago. The 60-foot sailing yacht Jocara, owned by British oceanography Professor John Potter from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, sailed all the way from Malaysia for the task. Along

The anchor from the shipwreck of the barque Diego.

Munshi-South and Buxton won a National Science

The mast from the shipwreck of the barque Diego.

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