Michael Lazare Katzev, classical art historian and marine archaeologist who supervised the eight-year effort to raise, preserve and study the 2,300-year-old Greek merchant ship Kyrenia, one of the oldest and most intact vessels ever recovered, has died. He was 62.

Katzev, Los Angeles-born former teacher at Oberlin College in Ohio and vice president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology that he helped found at Texas A&M University, died Sept. 8 at his home on the island of Southport, Maine. The cause was a stroke, said his wife, Susan, who had assisted with the Kyrenia project.

With an economics degree from Stanford University, Katzev seemed an unlikely antiquities sleuth but came to love the work. “Roughly equal to a three-martini buzz” he described undersea excavation to the Los Angeles Times in 1970.

The Kyrenia, named for the city in northern Cyprus near where it sank, was discovered by a Cypriot sponge diver in 1967. Katzev, who supervised scores of scientists, technicians and students from 12 countries in the meticulous excavation project, dived twice a day to examine the ship’s well-preserved pine planks and the cargo they bound.

Unlike hundreds of contemporary ships sunk in the Mediterranean, the little cargo ship had been buried quickly by silt and sand, sealed from harmful attack by oxygen or sea creatures. It was nearly 75 percent intact.

By 1969, Katzev and his team had labeled, measured, photographed, carefully dismantled and brought to the surface about 6,000 pieces of the wooden hull on metal trays buoyed by balloons.

The cargo recovered included 404 terra cotta jars called “amphorae” from Rhodes, which apparently had held wine; 29 grain-grinding millstones from Nisyros for ballast as well as trade and the remains of nearly 10,000 almonds.

What the ship carried helped trace its route among the Greek islands, and carbon dating of the wooden hull plus five Greek coins found aboard helped determine the ship’s age.

The Kyrenia, Katzev concluded after years of study in Athens libraries and elsewhere, had been a typical coastal trader in the days of Alexander the Great, whose crew ate and slept atop the bulky cargo.

Curiously, no personal items or bones of the crew were found. Katzev originally speculated that the ship, nearly 100 years old at the time it went down, sank from age deterioration or a storm. The sailors, he thought, might have escaped to shore.

But further study revealed iron spearheads under the hull, and Katzev decided pirates had attacked, taken cargo and captured the crew to sell as slaves. He also concluded, citing a missing section of the hull that was probably bashed in, the pirates had scuttled the ship to cover their crime.

Katzev’s work on the Kyrenia, as well as his other archeological projects, has been featured by the National Geographic, BBC and other television networks, and several newspapers and magazines around the world, as well as in the documentary, “With Captain, Sailors Three.”

After Stanford, Katzev earned a master’s degree in art history from the University of California, Berkeley, then pursued graduate work at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania.

He began to focus on original Greek bronze statues, and, deciding the best were buried at sea, studied excavation at Nemea, Greece. When not teaching, Katzev devoted his career to excavating and studying ancient Roman and Byzantine shipwrecks.

In addition to his wife of 35 years, he is survived by his brother Richard.