Maritime Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean

Maritime archaeology of the classical world explores the traders, travelers, pirates, fishermen, and warriors who sailed the ancient Mediterranean and its adjacent waters. Within the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, the sea and the distinctive opportunities it afforded for communication and interaction feature centrally to narratives of human development. Evidence for the socioeconomic world of seafaring comes not only from archaeological analysis of coastal and submerged sites, but also from literary and iconographic depictions of vessels, seafaring practices, and maritime life more broadly. From a methodological perspective, maritime archaeology involves survey and excavation both underwater and along the shore, focusing on shipwrecks, ports and harbors, inundated landscapes, as well as formerly submerged but now silted sites. These explorations require the adoption and adaptation of traditional archaeological practices alongside methods that borrow from the marine sciences. Maritime archaeology took hold early in the Mediterranean, where it owes its roots to the scientific exploration of ancient ships and harbors as some of the most sophisticated technologies among premodern societies. After more than a half century of focused explorations and detailed analyses, scholars have outlined diachronic development and regional patterns of Mediterranean shipbuilding techniques and seafaring practices. At the same time, survey work in recent decades has rapidly increased the bulk dataset while bringing new shores and deeper waters into the evolving picture of maritime connections. The vast numbers of shipwrecks recorded to date reveal long-term trends across the entire Mediterranean world; the prevalence of sunken merchant cargos and diverse ports allows increasingly sophisticated approaches to this data as a source for big-picture social and economic history. Along with the reconstruction of trade routes, networks of interaction and dynamic maritime landscapes have earned important places in this ongoing research. Increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches that engage with earth sciences (geoarchaeology, oceanography, etc.) and social sciences (network science, economic theory, etc.) brings new tools for understanding an environmental and institutional context of the structure, scale, and drivers behind seaborne mobility and interaction. All the while, the intensely studied material remains of ventures lost at sea continue to offer unparalleled glimpses into the personal lives of the diverse individuals who integrated this ancient Mediterranean world through the goods, news, ideas, and values they carried from port to port.