Work on the bottom, even at 130 feet, is not much different than work on land. The archaeologist's favorite tools are always the measuring tape and a pencil and notebook; our tapes are waterproof and our notebooks made of hard plastic sheeting, but documenting an object's context is the most important aspect of our job. Excavation is slow and careful, using a technique known as hand-fanning.

We don't fill buckets with sand; instead, we move our fingers, hands or arms in rhythmic, even swoops above the sand's surface to create a local current that lifts the sand away from its centuries-old resting place. Water dredges (oversized suction hoses) pull the sand into hoses that discharge their burden in the depths below the site, thus keeping the sand from smothering and choking the coral on the reef above us.

Usually the archaeologists will try to do all of one sort of task on a dive: some dives are devoted to tagging exposed timbers or artifacts; on others, we measure from known points to triangulate each artifact before it is moved or raised. Still other dives are spent setting up new equipment under water or in photography and documentation of the work and the site. Each person is assigned to a particular area and is responsible for its excavation and mapping, just as on land sites. But instead of eight hours at work, we have only one, split into two dives each day.

At the end of the dive, buddies slowly ascend together, often with a basket of artifacts or wood for further research on shore. After the safety stop, the archaeologists head for the surface, climb the platform's ladder, cinch their weight belts to its railings, and then make their way back to shore, carrying baskets of artifacts with them if needed.

A conservation squad usually meets incoming divers to take the crated objects to our storage tank built at the edge of the sea. We keep everything immersed in water in order to prevent damage caused by crystallizing salts or collapsing cellular structure until we can stabilize the archaeological finds at our conservation laboratory in Alexandria.

Meanwhile, the divers strip off their gear, rinse off, and have a quick cup of tea and a biscuit before going to work again. Each person has a designated land job as well as the underwater work. We have a recorder who keeps a journal of each archaeologist's efforts and observations of their area with maps and object lists to prevent loss of data. Others catalog artifacts by describing their composition, shape, decoration and dimensions. Still others will be busy drawing wood fragments or emptying jars to separate organic traces of the ship's original cargo from the sand and shells that overlay these clues to the past.

But most of the crew ends up training with our conservator, Howard Wellman, or with master concretionologists Emad Khalil and Douglas Haldane, as they learn to remove the naturally occurring concretion that coats many of our objects. Imagine mixing up a gallon of cement, dumping in a pound of popcorn shrimp (shells, heads and all), a handful of broken seashells, and then coating your grandmother's best china dinner plates in the mix and you will have a good idea of what we confront as we excavate the Sadana Island shipwreck.

Using scalpel and razor blades, the crew spend hours each day flaking away tiny specks of calcareous deposits to reveal brilliantly colored porcelain and dull brown earthenware-more than 3,000 objects have been at least partially cleaned to date, thanks to the concerted efforts of our conservators and dedicated team.

Lunch, another dive meeting, and a siesta (or more work) for an hour or so, then back to work. The afternoon dives usually take place between 4 and 6:30 pm, leaving the last team to walk in under twilight skies above blue-purple mountains in the west. During the afternoon, our camp manager Adel Farouk returns from his almost daily visits to Hurgada, 45 minutes north, where we get not only equipment and tools, but food, bread and ice for our coolers. Everyone helps unload the supplies, hoping for letters from home or even the ice cream bars Adel sometimes stashes in the coolers as a special treat. The water truck, which brings our fresh water from a town at the end of a desert pipeline originating at the Nile, is supposed to come every two days unless the driver's cousin gets married or he has to go get a permit or license renewed, in which case we scrounge drinking water from a campground or gas station.

Evenings begin as the sun sets. Everyone has showered the salt from their skin and changed into relatively clean clothes. Small groups congregate in and around the mess tent, some focused on an impromptu barbering or game, others simply sitting in silence as the sea and desert offer up their night colors. Once the generator is turned on, dinner is served and talk in Arabic, English, Swedish or German resumes. Later, cleared tables provide work surfaces for letter writing, journal keeping, and, always, archaeological drafting and documentation to keep up with the day's accomplishments. Howard Wellman spends his evenings in the conservation tent monitoring the progress of cleaning tasks and going through the day's finds with the archaeological director before keeping his own journals of artifact numbers and storage basins.

At ten o'clock, lights out, except for the photographer and darkroom assistants, who reward their late night developing and printing duties with a bit of chocolate pudding before turning in.

White tents shine in the light of a million stars, and often billow in the north wind as the camp lies still at last. But dawn comes early, six days a week, for the volunteer archaeological divers at Sadana Island.