See Statues and Mysterious Disk Found in Ancient Greek Shipwreck WATCH: The site made famous by the Antikythera mechanism continues to yield fascinating discoveries. ALSO: There's additional footage from the expedition at the end of the article. 
 
 Bronze limbs, a sarcophagus lid, marble statue pieces, and a mysterious bronze disk were among the remains found during excavations of one of the world's most ancient—and famous—shipwrecks. 
 
 Greece's Division of Underwater Antiquities—a government agency that's part of the country's ministry of archaeology—announced their finds Wednesday after several weeks of excavations, which lasted from September 4 to 20. Located just off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera 180 feet below the sea, the so-called Antikythera shipwreck can yield insights into Roman culture during its heyday. 
 
 "[Marine archaeologists] have found a very big treasure of statues of marble and bronze and other items," said expedition co-leader Aggeliki Simossi. 
 
 According to Simossi, the first century B.C. merchant ship would have been bound for Rome, where wealthy members of Roman society decorated their villas with Grecian art. Large for its time, the ship measured roughly 130 feet long, meaning a large stash of artifacts was on board when it set sail for Italy. 
 
 Video taken during the excavation shows the archaeologists pulling a realistic sculpture fragment of an arm from the elbow to the fingers. The open tilt of some of the statues' hands, with fingers seeming to gesture up and outward, suggest they were modeled after philosophers. 
 
 While the statues would likely have been considered high art in their day, perhaps the most intriguing artifact found is a small, bronze disk. Punctuated with holes and decorated with the image of a bull, it's unclear what the disk was used for, said Simossi. 
 
 Watch how a team of marine archaeologists excavated the ancient ship and (at minute seven) uncovered its mysterious remains. 
 
 "It is maybe decoration for furniture or maybe a seal, or it could be an instrument," she said. "It is very early to say." 
 
 It's also reminiscent of the Antikythera mechanism, a small, bronze disk that measures celestial movements with impressive accuracy. That piece was found among the ship's remains in 2006. The mechanism is so accurate, in fact, that it's often referred to as an "ancient computer." 
 
 The team of archaeologists, co-led by Simossi and archaeologist Brendan Foley from Lund University in Sweden, will continue studying the remains of this year's haul, before returning to the shipwreck site in May of 2018 for more excavations. 
 
 While Simossi said this year's field work yielded a bigger haul than previous years, the Antikythera shipwreck has been the archaeological gift that keeps on giving. It was first discovered in 1900 by sponge divers, who spotted limbs from bronze statues. 
 
 The "orphan" limbs, as they're called by archaeologists, suggested early on that more treasure was waiting to be found. Famous French marine explorer Jacques Cousteau excavated the ruins in 1976, finding additional statues and some smaller artifacts. (Read more about Jacques Cousteau's work and why he was so influential.) 
 
 While the site has been well known for over 100 years, excavations have been intermittent since Cousteau's trip in the 1970s. Foley's focus on the region in 2014 renewed archaeological interest. Perhaps one of the most significant finds came during September of last year, when archaeologists found human remains at the site. It was the first opportunity to examine 2,000-year-old DNA from the wreck, which may provide more clues about its history. The DNA is still being analyzed but initial work suggests it was likely a young male. 
 
 Discussing the find in 2016 with Nature, Foley speculated that the ship sank suddenly and from natural conditions—most likely a storm. ||||| Archaeologists began Monday using a revolutionary new deep sea diving suit to explore the ancient shipwreck where one of the most remarkable scientific objects of antiquity was found. 
 
 The so-called Antikythera Mechanism, a 2nd-century BC device known as the world's oldest computer, was discovered by sponge divers in 1900 off a remote Greek island in the Aegean. 
 
 The highly complex mechanism of up to 40 bronze cogs and gears was used by the ancient Greeks to track the cycles of the solar system. It took another 1,500 years for an astrological clock of similar sophistication to be made in Europe. 
 
 Now archaeologists returning to the wreck will be able to use a new diving suit which will allow them to more than double the depth they can dive at, and stay safely at the bottom for longer. 
 
 - Double the diving depth - 
 
 The Exosuit, built in Canada by Nuytco Research, will permit divers to reach depths of 150 metres (492 feet) and still perform delicate tasks, says archaeologist Theotokis Theodoulou. 
 
 The suit, which resembles a puffy space suit, "expands our capabilities", Theodoulou told AFP as the team set off for a month-long expedition to Antikythera, which lies between Crete and the Peloponnese. 
 
 "I'll be able to grasp, pluck, clench and dig... for several hours," he said. 
 
 Archaeologists believe many other artefacts are yet to be discovered in and around the wreck. Up to now they had only been able to operate at a depth of 60 metres. 
 
 The mechanism was found with a spectacular bronze statue of a youth in the wreck of a cargo ship apparently carrying booty to Rome, and researchers are certain that other items on board still remain to be discovered. 
 
 "We have good signs that there are other objects present," said Angeliki Simosi, head of Greece's directorate of underwater antiquities, after exploratory dives in the area in 2012 and 2013. 
 
 "There are dozens of items left, this was a ship bearing immense riches from Asia Minor," added Dimitris Kourkoumelis, another archaeologist on the team. 
 
 The archaeologists also hope to confirm the presence of a second ship, some 250 metres away from the original discovery site. 
 
 Antikythera, which now has a population of only 44, was on one of antiquity's busiest trade routes, and a base for Cilician pirates, some of whom once captured and held the young Julius Caesar for ransom. He later had them all captured and crucified. 
 
 - Monumental statues - 
 
 The Greek team is assisted by Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist from the renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at Massachusetts, which was involved in a dive to the wreck of the Titanic. 
 
 Foley has helped in outings to identify ancient shipwrecks over the last five years. 
 
 "We may find one or more monumental statues that were left behind in 1901, in the mistaken belief that they were rocks," Foley said. 
 
 As well as the new Exosuit, the Antikythera expedition will also use robot mapping equipment and new advanced closed-circuit "rebreathers", which will allow divers much more time underwater. 
 
 "We will have more bottom time than any previous human visitors to the site, because we dive with mixed gas rebreathers," the expedition's website said. 
 
 "Each diver will have more than 30 minutes of bottom time per day, and will enjoy greater mental acuity and a larger safety margin than that of previous divers at Antikythera." 
 
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– It was considered one of the most precious metals in ancient times—and Plato claimed it lined the temple of Poseidon on the legendary island of Atlantis—but this appears to be the first time anybody in modern times has actually found some orichalcum. Researchers in Sicily say a shipwreck from 2,600 years ago, not long before the time of Plato, has yielded 39 ingots of the mysterious metal, Discovery reports. Scholars have long debated the composition of the alloy mentioned in ancient writings, but testing has revealed the Sicily ingots to be a copper-zinc mix with small percentages of nickel, lead, and iron. "Nothing similar has ever been found," says the superintendent of Sicily's Sea Office. "We knew orichalcum from ancient texts and a few ornamental objects." He tells the Giornale di Sicilia that the ingots were apparently bound for workshops in the town of Gela, probably coming from Greece or Asia Minor, when the ship transporting them sank. The find, he says, "opens prospects of great importance to the research and study of ancient routes of supply of metals in the ancient Mediterranean. ... It will provide us with precious information on Sicily's most ancient economic history." (Divers recently found a "holy grail" of shipwrecks.)