Ships Harbouring in Ports

Until the emergence of the modern container ship, vessels spent a significant part of their lifespan in a harbour.

The time period when a ship sets anchor in a harbour is key as the entire harbour was designed to offer mooring and all the facilities required for her stay.

Yet, a harbour was not merely the accumulation of standings structures made of stone, concrete, or wood that helped ships make fast in Roman harbours.

Associated activities extended beyond their principal basin, taking place on a far larger scale and in an agglomeration of different areas than previously conceived by scholars and archaeologists. These together constituted a harbour system, one of the most significant foundations of ancient economies.

The project’s aims are 1) to identify the various operational parts of harbours, 2) to consider how the functions carried out there were combined into a larger area, and 3) to consolidate a set of tools that together comprise a unified methodology, which can be applied to examples elsewhere.

Beyond these larger concerns, the project explores specific issues regarding ships when mooring in harbours: what type of vessels did they include? What were their needs and what structures could fulfil them? Did they change according to the different seasons of the year?

The project comprises an investigation of what we term a “harbour system,” relying on the three case studies of Caesarea, Terracina, and Port-Vendres, and considers the specificities of each site and their individual environmental context.

The end goal is that the interdisciplinary methodology developed by our project at the above sites explored within a comparative framework can be later adapted and applied to similar harbour sites elsewhere.