Offerings at Sea When hundreds of Phoenician ceramic figurines and vessels were first recovered from the seafloor off northern Israel almost 50 years ago, archaeologists interpreted the artifacts as cargo from a fifth-century B.C. shipwreck. Now, University of Haifa archaeologists Meir Edrey, Adi Erlich, and Assaf Yasur-Landau have reassessed the artifacts and determined that they were deliberately cast into the water, likely as part of a ritual that was repeated from the seventh through third centuries B.C. Unlike other Phoenician caches of ritual statuettes, Edrey explains, all th...