One of the most important of recent projects in Roman archaeology is Simon Keay’s programme of geophysical survey and excavation at Rome’s Imperial port city, Portus. The results of this work, carried out under the aegis of the British School at Rome, have already been published in a couple of monographs (Keay et al Reference Keay, Millett, Paroli and Strutt2005; Keay and Paroli 2011). But Portus cannot be viewed in isolation, so Keay has given his programme an international dimension by setting up the Roman Ports Project, a forum of researchers studying various aspects of Mediterranean trade. The volume under review is the first major fruit of this initiative: specifically, it presents the proceedings of a workshop on Roman port networks, held at Rome in March 2008.
The aim is ‘to investigate the broader commercial role of Portus in relation to Rome, Ostia, and the rest of the Mediterranean’. There are twenty-three papers in all, classified under seven main headings. After the editor’s introduction, four papers look at Portus and Ostia, and three deal with ships and navigation. There follows a series of regional studies, with two papers on Italy and Sicily, five on Spain, one on Africa and three on the East. Finally come four papers on broader issues, including technical matters such as the geoarchaeology of selected ports and the methodologies that are being developed for the processing of data on the trading relationships between ports.
It is impossible to do justice to this volume in a short review, but the general standard of the contributions is remarkably high, and the coverage impressively wide-ranging. The focus of attention is, naturally, directed to areas where research is in progress, and certain biases are inevitable. Whereas the ports of Baetica form the subject of four papers, for instance, those within the provinces of Tarraconensis and Gallia Narbonensis are largely neglected (except in the context of broader studies) and, in the East, there is nothing on European Greece or the Syro-Palestinian coast. But these are gaps that may be filled by future workshops, and we must be profoundly grateful for what has been encompassed by the papers that we have.
The volume’s most important achievement is to provide insights into the complexity of Roman maritime trade, which it seeks to reconstruct on the basis of various forms of evidence: cargoes found in shipwrecks, commodities recovered in excavations of harbour installations and warehouses, and what we know about prevailing winds and viable sea routes. This undertaking has been aided by the enormous progress of petrological and chemical analysis, which has made it possible to identify the precise sources of many of the durable materials (primarily ceramics and marbles, but also glass) that were the objects of trade. However, where a ship’s cargo, say, consisted of items from a number of different places, what does that signify? It used to be assumed that goods were picked up at their places of origin by hopping from port to port along the coasts; but it is becoming increasingly apparent (from the way in which ships were loaded, for example) that goods were often brought from smaller ports to central emporia, from where they were redistributed. As a result we need to think in terms of a much more complicated pattern of trading networks than previously envisaged and one which, moreover, changed from period to period. It is also probable that we have underestimated the extent to which voyages were made not along coasts but, where sailing conditions allowed, by direct routes across the open sea.
Such ideas, as well as a wealth of fascinating titbits of information (for example, the fact that redundant amphorae were used to construct wharves both at Cadiz and at Myos Hormos on the Red Sea), make this volume a richly rewarding read. It represents an excellent anthology and augurs well for any future workshops on trade in the Roman Mediterranean.
