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The UK Marine Area covers 867,400 km2, 3.5 times the terrestrial extent. Our marine heritage is extraordinary. Shipwrecks from the Bronze Age to the World Wars bear testimony to Britain as an island nation, a destination for trade and conquest and, in the past, the heart of a global empire. Coastal communities have been shaped by their maritime heritage with stories of loss and heroism. Deeper in time, what is now the North Sea was dry land, peopled by prehistoric communities. Our current land would have been distant uplands above hills and plains and rivers now lost and forgotten. Numerous collections represent this heritage, covering 23,000 years, including charts, documents, images, film, oral histories, sonar surveys, seismic data, bathymetry, archaeological investigations, artefacts, artworks and palaeoenvironmental cores. These are unconnected and inaccessible. This matter because the story of our seas is of huge interest to the UK public, with millions visiting maritime museums annually, and marine exploitation increasing dramatically for energy, minerals, trade, food and leisure. To unlock new stories and effect sustainable management, we must join up our marine collections. Unpath’d Waters brings together universities, agencies, museums, trusts and experts to confront this challenge. AI is being applied to innovate searching across collections, simulations to visualise landscapes, and science to identify wrecks and research their artefacts. Unpath’d Waters will deliver management tools to protect our most significant heritage and invite the public to co-design new ways of interacting with the collections. The methods, code and resources created will be published openly so they can used to shape the future of UK marine heritage.

International audience; Located to the east of the Gulf of Fos, about 11 km from the well-known Roman harbour of Fos-sur-Mer, the Laurons cove is a small, protected area made up of three creeks that has yielded important archaeological remains, including ancient port facilities associated with a dozen wrecks. This complex of remains was the subject of surveys as early as 1977, which were very quickly followed by surveys and excavations directed by Serge Ximenes and Martine Moerman (GRASM) in the 1980s and early 1990s. Since the 1990s, the wrecks have been reopened from time to time, notably as part of a dendrochronological programme led by P. Pomey and F. Guibal in 1994. The archaeological remains of the Anse de Laurons have been the subject of uneven documentation and studies, which have produced an important bibliography, particularly on a series of submerged structures (mainly Quai E, dumps and North and South breakwater) interpreted as belonging to an ancient port area used from the 3rd century BC to the 6th-7th centuries AD (Moerman 1994, Fontaine et al. 2019, pp. 21-22). However, and despite an abundant scientific literature, the available data presented many obscure points, both for the dating of certain structures - in particular Quai Eand the vast dump - and for their interpretation. We took up the “port structures and wrecks” dossier of the “Anse de Laurons” in the framework of the MoMArch Master’s school project (AMU-Drassm), in the continuity of previous research in the Gulf of Fos and with the desire to answer questions that remained unresolved in spite of the numerous archaeological campaigns of the 1980s. After two archaeological campaigns (2021 and 2022) we have had a series of answers, but not exactly the ones we were expecting, especially concerning the submerged structure known as ‘Quai E’, which we can no longer link to the Antique period. The aim of this talk is to present the preliminary results of these two campaigns, which already provide important news both on the chronology and on the interpretation of the structures in the Laurons cove.