By far and away my favorite TV show at the moment is Mad Men, that superb retro drama set at the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency on Madison Avenue in New York during the early 1960s. I am fascinated by the characters and their shameless careerism and cynicism, and I love the producers’ obsessive attention to detail and historical accuracy. I’d forgotten how exquisite the dresses were in the sixties, how clean the offices looked without all that clunky computer equipment cluttering desks and cables running everywhere, and just how free smokers were to puff away to their heart’s content.

It is worth remembering, however, that the real Mad Men of New York didn’t invent the art of persuasion: they merely pushed it to glossy new heights. As early as the 1^st -century AD, wealthy Roman merchants had mastered branding and marketing, as I discovered while exploring the palatial residence of Umbricius Scaurus at Pompeii in the company of British archaeologist Andrew Wallace-Hadrill.

Umbricius Scaurus and his family manufactured and sold four different types of fish sauces, including the rather famous garum , to Roman households. Today people tend to turn up their noses at the thought of splashing a main course with a flavoring made from liquefied fish intestines, but I am told that it was actually very tasty. According to Robert Curtis, a professor of classics at the University of Georgia who has studied garum extensively, the popular Roman seasoning tasted much like the fish sauce found in Thai and Vietnamese cooking today.

But back to Umbricius Scaurus. As well as being a skilled manufacturer, the Campanian tycoon had a real talent for branding his products, always keeping his name in front of the consumer. The terracotta vessels that bore his fish sauces at Pompeii, for example, often carried a painted inscription, Ex Officina Scaurus , “from the shop of Scaurus.” And some even featured little advertising slogans, such as “the flower of garum , made from the mackerel, a product of Scaurus, from the shop of Agathopus.”

Umbricius Scaurus didn’t believe, however, in leaving his work at the office. In the atrium of his sprawling split-level home in Pompeii, he installed a kind of advertising billboard - a mosaic floor representing four large fish sauce vessels, most carrying Scaurus’s name. Visitors could scarcely have missed this giant commercial message. And those invited into his personal quarters probably never forgot how the owner made his fortune. The house overlooked the Mediterranean, and as Wallace-Hadrill told me, “from here, Scaurus could see his ships sailing off to Spain, carrying his fish sauce.”

Clearly Mad Men’s Don Draper had little on Umbricius Scaurus. But this week, I came across another intriguing footnote to this story. Scientists at Pompeii’s Applied Laboratory have just managed to date the Vesuvius eruption that destroyed the seaside Roman town: they obtained this date from bits of garum that still clung to seven vessels in the home of Umbricius Scaurus.

My thanks to Robert Curtis, who supplied the photo of the garum vessel depicted on Scaurus’s floor.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Iceland chafed mightily against the moratorium levied by the International Whaling Committee on hunting the world’s endangered cetaceans. According to whaling advocates, Iceland possessed a tradition of subsistence whaling stretching back to the 12^th century: Icelanders, they claimed, had long depended on supplies of whale meat and had developed a real taste for this fare. Environmentalists, however, suspected darker motives. Icelandic whalers, they charged, planned to sell tons of whale meat into a voracious Japanese seafood market, where cetacean flesh commanded top yen. In 2006, the whalers had their way: Iceland resumed a commercial hunt for whales.

I mention this because of a fascinating archaeological story that surfaced in the Icelandic press two days ago. Along the rocky shores of Steinsgrímsfjördur in northeastern Iceland, archaeologists have now unearthed remains of a 17^th century Basque whaling station—complete with a facility for rendering whale fat, a workshop for making barrels for whale oil, and a residence and cemetery for the Basque whalers .

This discovery is intriguing for many reasons. History, after all, is silent on the presence of the Basque whalers in Iceland at this time. The island’s Danish rulers strictly forbid commercial operations by foreigners from 1603 to 1787, so Basque whalers operated well under the official radar. More importantly, however, this discovery reveals in detail how Iceland’s whales were exploited early on by foreign businesses. The 17^th century Basque definitely weren’t there for subsistence: they came to obtain two precious commodities in the European markets: whale oil to fuel lamps and lubricate machines, and baleen—a strong flexible material from the whales’ mouths—that served much like plastic in products as diverse as buggy whips and fishing rods.

And this new archeological find fits into a much bigger picture. During the 1980s Canadian archaeologists uncovered major Basque whaling stations sprinkled along the shores of Red Bay in remote Labrador, on Canada’s east coast. Years of archival and archaeological research revealed that at least 15 Basque ships and 600 men departed annually from France and Spain for the between 1530 and 1600 for Red Bay. There they spent the summer slaughtering right and bowhead whales and rendering the fat into oil for Europe. These were important industrial operations, and as Parks Canada nautical archaeologist Robert Grenier explained to me in one conversation we had on this subject, “the Basque had very modern ways to do things fast and efficiently."

What archaeology is now showing us here with crystal clarity is how far back industrial whaling really went in the north Atlantic, and how long humans have been pressuring whale populations. I think this places the modern Icelandic whale hunt in a whole new light – as just one more chapter in a sad tale of exploitation.

A great story beamed across my desk this week—a story that initially aroused my deep suspicions and has now completely captured my imagination.  It’s a story about a perilous sea route; a sleek Renaissance ship laden with astrolabes, gold coins and elephant ivory; and a modern quest for diamonds off the Namibian coast.  It’s a story that could easily have ended in disaster for archaeologists and triumph for treasure hunters—but didn’t.   It’s such a rare kind of story that I’d like to tell you about it. 

Last April, geologists working for the Namdeb Diamond Corp along the coast of Namibia, in southwestern Africa, spied something unusual in a newly exposed stretch of seabed:  copper ingots and cylindrical objects resembling cannon barrels.  The company—a joint venture between the Namibian government and De Beers—had just constructed a massive earthen dike in the area and drained the seabed at great cost to search for gems.   But the Namdeb geologists halted the work and reported their find to the company’s archaeological consultant, Dieter Noli.   Noli, in turn, swiftly identified the finds as detritus from a European shipwreck and mounted a recovery.

Two days ago,  Namibia’s information ministry announced that the mystery ship was a 16^th century Portuguese Indiaman bound for Asia carrying thousands of gold and silver coins, several tons of copper ingots, and more than 50 elephant tusks.  The vessel bristled with bronze cannons to defend its treasures from pirates.    

Here’s the thing.  The Portuguese Indiamen were the space shuttles of Renaissance Europe—sleek wooden ships designed to sail what was then the longest and most dangerous sea route in the world, from Portugal to India.  Indeed Indiamen seem to have been the most technologically sophisticated sailing ships of their time, three and four-storied vessels capable of surviving both the ice storms of the African cape and the cyclones of Asia.  But archaeologists still know relatively little about the evolving design of these vessels. 

The reason for this is very simple.  The Indiamen were treasure ships.   They ferried the wealth of Asia—gold bullion, diamonds, sapphires and many other valuables—to the Portuguese court and Portuguese merchants.   So for years now, treasure hunters have rapaciously targeted the wrecks of the Indiamen.  One company has even struck a deal with the government of Mozambique to obtain exclusive rights to its shipwrecks in exchange for a share of the loot.   Since then it has been selling off the finds from the Indiamen that wrecked along Mozambique shores.   

When I first read about the Namibian wreck, I worried that this was just another sorry treasure hunt dressed up as science.  Maritime looters, after all, are very fond of disguising their operations as legitimate archaeology.  But when I emailed Filipe Castro, a nautical archaeologist at Texas A & M University and one of the world’s great authorities on the Portuguese Indiamen, yesterday, he told me that he had flown out to Namibia to see the wreck site himself, and found it in the hands of serious, competent archaeologists. 

What a stroke of luck this is for science and archaeology.   Now  we all have a chance to learn something new and important about the wonders of the lost Indiamen.