Nicholas Bartos is delighted to join ISAW as a Research Scholar and to serve as the George F. Bass Lecturer (Archaeological Institute of America National Program) for the 2026–27 academic year. Prior to coming to New York, he was an Assistant Professor (Full-Time Adjunct Appointment) in the Department of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles (2024–26).
He completed a PhD in Classics at Stanford University (2024), an MPhil in Archaeology at the University of Oxford (St. John's College, 2015), and a BA in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University (2013).
His research principally focuses on how maritime connections structured socioeconomic life in the Mediterranean and the western Indian Ocean during the Roman period. Through ongoing archaeological fieldwork both on land and underwater, he analyzes the material signatures of maritime activity to address questions about the formation of multicultural seaside communities, the development of the ancient economy, and the long-term trajectories of social history.
His current book project uses computational sailing models, port assemblages, and ancient texts such as the Periplus Maris Erythraei to trace the evolution and cultural impacts of commercial relationships in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Arabian Sea between the Roman annexation of Egypt (30 BCE) and the Early Muslim Conquest (639 CE). As part of this research, he is a ceramicist at the Berenike Project on the Egyptian Red Sea and has studied material at several sites along the coast of western and southern India.
In the Mediterranean, he worked in southeastern Sicily for the past ten years, first on the excavations of the Marzamemi 2 "church wreck" (6th century CE) and then as field director for underwater survey at the ports of Vendicari, Marzamemi, and Portopalo di Capo Passero with the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project (Hellenistic to early modern periods).
Other ongoing work centers on the colonial legacies of the ancient Indian Ocean, interactions between indigenous nomadic groups and others in the Eastern Desert of Roman Egypt, Greco-Roman cultic practice and ritual in cosmopolitan port sites, and methodologies for maritime survey and modeling ancient mobility.
Recent research was supported by the American Research Center in Egypt, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, Economic History Association, Mellon Foundation, and Stanford Europe Center and School of Humanities and Sciences.
Click here for a curriculum vitae and select publications.