The wreck itself wasn’t exactly a surprising discovery. Mljet lies along one of antiquity’s main east-west sea trade routes, connecting Italian hubs like Ravenna and Venice with Constantinople (now Istanbul) and points east. Over the years, archaeological surveys of the seabed around the picturesque island, with its Roman ruins and the ancient harbor of Polače at its western tip, had yielded more than two dozen old wrecks, ranging from the remains of a Roman ship from the second century B.C. to that of a 16th-century A.D. Venetian merchantman laden with rare Ottoman ceramics. But even in an area relatively littered with historical wrecks, something about the cauldron told Miholjek that this one was different from the others.