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The Antiquities Authority announced on Wednesday the staggering find of a large number of ancient pottery pieces, fully intact and safely stored... in a basement.It all began with a phone call to the authority: “In my basement, there are full boxes of ancient vases and pottery that a member of my family, a fisherman, left before he died... I want to pass the pottery on to the state, and I want my grandchildren to know where to see them in the future.”Soon after the phone call, two archeologists from the Antiquities arrived at the home of the caller, Osnat Lester, in the Galilee town of Poriya Illit.They were amazed to see the extent of the treasure: neatly wrapped in cloth and stacked in boxes were a large number of pottery vessels, clearly ancient and rare. Most of the pieces were fully intact, and the rest were in large fragments.Lester’s fisherman relative had “fished” the pottery out of the Mediterranean Sea. The surfaces of the vases were encrusted with seashells and other ocean sediments, including the occasional fossil.This is not the first find of its type – according to Antiquities Authority spokeswoman Yoli Shwartz, there is much to be found in the depths of the ocean.Thousands of years ago, Israel’s shores were a focal point for trade channels.Located smack in the middle between the ancient dynasties in Egypt and Lebanon, many maritime merchants docked and traded, and some sunk by the shore, leaving a trail of artifacts on the ocean floor.