A group of archeologists from Yogyakarta have discovered ancient Chinese ceramic artifacts estimated to date from between the 13th and 16th century AD in the waters around Genting Island, off the coast of the Central Java town of Jepara.

Head of the team, Priyatno Hadi Sulistyarto, said Friday the findings indicated that the Java Sea was a busy international trade route.

“From the features of the artifacts, which depict animal and flower motifs, albeit not so detailed, we assume the commodities were manufactured as mass products. They have characteristics commonly found in the Ming Dynasty,” Priyatno said.

The 16 member team includes three underwater archeologists. A dive master from the Association of Indonesian Diving Sports was hired to lead the underwater search.

The artifacts were located 200 meters from the coast, at a depth of between two and 2.5 meters.

Local resident Suminto, 28, said people on the island were aware of the artifacts for a long time but did not think they were historical items.

Priyatno said his team was originally searching for a shipwreck around Genting Island and the remaining parts of Karimunjawa Islands

A team of divers is set to plunge into Lake Ontario near Kingston, Ont., next week in a bid to confirm the discovery of a legendary Canadian-built ship from the War of 1812, the HMS Wolfe.

In collaboration with marine archeologists from Parks Canada, the divers plan to take detailed measurements, drawings and photographs of a sunken wooden sailing vessel that appears to match the size and last known location of the famous 32-metre sloop: the flagship of British naval commander James Yeo and star of a dramatic 1813 battle west of Toronto that helped thwart the U.S. invasion of Canada.

The suspected discovery comes just three years before the 200th anniversary of the war, adding urgency to the efforts to identify a possible new showcase relic for bi-national commemoration activities.

“We’re hoping it’s the Wolfe,” said Dianne Groll, a Queen’s University psychiatry professor and avid diver who made a preliminary inspection of the wreck site in May.

“We’re 99 per cent sure it is,” she told Canwest News Service on Wednesday. “With any luck, we should have the formal survey done by the end of July.”

The underwater probe, to be carried out by the Kingston-based heritage group, Preserve Our Wrecks, with support from Parks Canada, will include making bow-to-stern measurements of the rotting hulk, producing sketches and photos of joints, ribs and other telltale features of the ship’s construction, and taking core samples of the wood to determine the types of trees used by the builders.

Groll said the wreck has been known about for years and has been studied by federal archeologist Jonathan Moore. Last summer, Kingston diver Kenn Feigelman generated media attention after taking sonar readings and pictures at the wreck site.

The potential find follows the recent discovery in Lake Ontario of the Revolutionary War vessel HMS Ontario, and last year’s Parks Canada-led high-tech probe of the sunken Hamilton and Scourge, two American ships from the War of 1812 that went down in a storm near Hamilton.

The ship, renamed HMS Montreal later in the war, was built on the Lake Ontario shore and played a brief but important role in the crucial struggle against the Americans for control of the Great Lakes.

In a famous 1813 engagement known as the Burlington Races, a damaged HMS Wolfe was under intense fire near present-day Toronto, but just managed to escape the enemy assault by retreating rapidly westward to a gun-protected shore near Burlington Bay.

A defeat in that battle — which came just days after a major U.S. victory on Lake Erie — could have given the Americans free rein over the lower lakes and, according to a leading War of 1812 naval historian, made certain Ontario became “a state of the American union.”

The ship, which was involved in numerous battles throughout the 1812-1814 war, was scuttled years after the war in waters off Kingston, along with several other vessels that had outlived their usefulness in peacetime Upper Canada.

Naval historian Robert Williamson has called the Burlington Races “a pivotal engagement that would determine the outcome of the War of 1812.”

In a 1999 essay published in the journal Canadian Military History, Williamson reconstructed the events of Sept. 28, 1813, using the logbooks of the Wolfe, which had only recently been opened to researchers by the U.S. national archives in Washington.

The historian debunked a popular tale that the British ships had actually vaulted a sandbar to escape their American pursuers, but Williamson concluded that the survival of the Wolfe and the other vessels was a true turning point in Canadian history.

“Yeo’s Lake Ontario naval squadron survived the scrape of 28 September as strong as ever,” Williamson wrote. “In fact, it went on the offensive in the following spring and helped to capture Fort Oswego. . . . By maintaining the integrity of his squadron, Yeo played a far more important role in the events of the War of 1812 that shaped our future than generations of historians have been prepared to grant him.”

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Adding to the intrigue, one dishwasher-size rock seems to bear an etching of a mastodon.

“The first thing I said when I came out of the water was, ‘Oh no, I wish we wouldn’t have found this,’ ” said Holley, whose usual prey is sunken boats. “This is going to invite so much controversy that this is where we’re going to be for the next 20 years.”

This spring Holley and a student from Northwestern Michigan College hope to make laser scans of the image that will yield a computer model. That will help scientists assess the site, which is otherwise off limits because of American Indian concerns that the area could be sacred.

Researchers who study early American Indians say they will need more evidence to be convinced the stones are a human artifact. They are especially wary of the idea of a mastodon petroglyph. Mastodons were facing extinction when early humans were on the scene, and the few that still existed in North America lived much farther south, evidence shows.

“It would be the only visual representation of such in the whole hemisphere,” said a skeptical Charles Cleland, retired curator of Great Lakes archeology and ethnology at Michigan State University. “It would be a really spectacular find—if it turns out to be true.”

Still, Hank Bailey of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians said, “There’s a lot that we haven’t learned.” Moreover, to American Indian eyes, the rocks seem to be arranged with some purpose, he said.

“It could easily be a ceremonial site,” said Bailey, who gave underwater photographs of the stones to religious leaders. “The same kind of thing that I see there is the same kind of things we use, so why couldn’t it have been connected to our people further back than modern archeologists know?”

Evidence shows human families were present in northern Michigan thousands of years ago. They traversed a barren tundra dotted by stands of fir trees in pursuit of elk and woodland caribou, gathering nuts and berries as they passed.

People did not linger in such a cold, marginal land, but they did mine chert for spear points from a site near Charlevoix and left evidence of campsites in the area, Cleland said.

Humans of that time frequently arranged stones to dam streams—to trap fish and for other reasons, said Northwestern University archeologist James Brown.

“Until they’re investigated archeologically, it’s hard to tell,” Brown said of the submerged formation.

Holley found the site by accident while doing lake floor survey work in summer 2007 for the Grand Traverse Bay Underwater Preserve. After several passes, a row of stones became clear. When divers visited the site to take photographs, they were left vaguely unnerved. “It was really spooky when we saw it in the water,” Holley said. “The whole site is spooky, in a way. When you’re swimming through a long line of stones and the rest of the lake bed is featureless, it’s just spooky.”

To satisfy Grand Traverse Bay’s American Indian community, which wants to minimize the number of visitors to the site, and to preserve his prerogative to research the spot, Holley has kept its exact location a secret.

He said he hopes a computer model of the gouges in the mastodon rock will help experts tell whether the features were a trick of chance cut by glacial forces or were the work of ancient humans.

Cleland said petroglyphs are rare in the Upper Midwest and stone circles are more common among primitive farmers than among the hunter-gatherers who traveled through Michigan.

“But I think this is certainly something that needs to be investigated,” Cleland said. “It would be unthinkable to leave it alone and not try to figure it out.”