Project description
Uncovering mysteries of ancient harbours
For centuries, harbours have served as essential hubs for maritime trade, a place where ships found refuge from the open sea. However, these harbours were more than docking points; they were intricate systems vital to ancient economies. With this in mind, the ERC-funded SHIPs project seeks to identify the multifaceted operational components within harbours. It will also explore how these functions are interconnected within a broader context. And third, it aims to establish a unified methodology applicable to various harbour examples. Focusing on Caesarea, Terracina and Port-Vendres, this project delves into the specifics of each site, adapting its methodology to their unique environmental conditions.
Objective
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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
31905 Haifa
Israel