ABSTRACT
Today the Baltic Sea is a unique resource for marine archaeology. The low salinity (5-10 practical salinity units (PSU)) of the water has excluded aggressive marine borers, and historical shipwrecks can be found intact both above and beneath the seabed. The Vasa ship, the number one tourist attraction of Stockholm, Sweden, is an example of the unique preservation conditions in the Baltic Sea (Figure 1). It is estimated that around 100,000 shipwrecks are present in the Baltic today and at least 6000 are of high archaeological importance (Olsson, 2006). The nine countries that surround the Baltic — Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia — discover new wrecks each year and consequently the number of wrecks is still rising.
