Roman warships and how to find them: A study of the Egadi Islands Naval Battle Site, the artefacts found and how to find more.

Abstract

On March 13, 241 BC off the western coast of Sicily a Roman naval force intercepted a Carthaginian resupply mission on its way to Sicily. Over the course of the past nineteen years, the Battle of the Egadi Islands Survey Project has been searching for remains of the naval battle between Roman and Carthaginian forces. The site is the only example of an archaeologically verified ancient naval battle in the Mediterranean and one of the few examples of archaeologically contextualized naval rams. This dissertation explores what we have learned about ancient warships in the Mediterranean through the experience and context provided by the Battle of the Egadi Islands Battle Site. One of the main outcomes is using the real time experience to help define a guidance document that can help in future searches of ancient Mediterranean warships. This guidance document is presented in Appendix J as a quick to access data sheet for future projects. The other main focus of this body of work is presenting and challenging the models with which ancient Mediterranean warships were codified categorized and studied in previous scholarship. While previous scholarship has determined a potential definition of this classification system, this dissertation challenges those previous assumptions by presenting them and challenging them through the artefacts found at the Battle of the Egadi Islands. The outcome of this work is focused on the question of can the experiences gained at the Battle of the Egadi Islands Survey Project help uncover other ancient naval battle sites?

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mateusz Wojciech Przyluska-Polakowski: orcid.org/0000-0002-1166-6217

ORCID for Anna Collar: orcid.org/0000-0002-7274-2674

ORCID for Julian Whitewright: orcid.org/0000-0002-3548-0978

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