Amphoras about to be raised from the site of a Late Roman shipwreck (ca. 400 CE) excavated between 1967 and 1974 at Yassıada, Turkey. Courtesy of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.
Visiting Research Scholar Lecture: Maritime Commerce and Community
Justin Leidwanger
Recent attempts to utilize shipwrecks for answering long-term economic questions tend either to build models from single excavated vessels or rely on numbers to quantify trade through time. Drawing on Roman and Late Roman (1st- to 7th-century CE) sites off southwest Turkey and Cyprus, I offer an alternative approach that situates shipwrecks within a broader landscape of material evidence for maritime activity. This landscape can be viewed in literary descriptions of maritime journeys and modeled through a GIS exploration of wind patterns, environmental features, and sailing technologies that affected the range and diversity of connectivity. Through this methodology, regional networks based on small ships and short distances of a day or two days’ sail become visible. Such interconnected maritime economic regions allowed for dependable commercial exchange among communities. Varying degrees of integration—and fragmentation—within and across this network structure speak to patterns of economic regionalism and aid our understanding of how administrative and financial shifts, as well as the changing fortunes of the empire affected communication across the sea. These networks and regions provide a more variegated economic texture—geographically, chronologically, and socially—and a dynamic alternative to the flat uniform blueness often portrayed in Mediterranean connectivity.
There will be a reception folowing the event.
To RSVP, please email isaw@nyu.edu.