Space, accessibility and movement at the Portus Romae

The scale of harbour infrastructure is often being assumed to be an index of the economic importance of Roman Mediterranean ports, underwritten by well-organized commercial interaction between shippers, merchants and port authorities. In reality, however, this is a premise that has never been tested, since much of what we know about many of them is based upon partial studies of different aspects of the archaeological record. This has invited a range of very rough calculations based upon surface area, size of basins, number of ships that could be accommodated and the range of imported ceramics and other archaeological evidence. This paper adopts a different approach. It focuses upon the Portus Augusti, the maritime port of Imperial Rome, which has seen much intensive research in recent years, and which is an important proxy for the commercial connections between Rome and the Mediterranean at large for at least 400 years. Here, the contributors use different spatial techniques to model the movement of ships and people through the port as an index of its permeability to commercial traffic, and thus its efficiency in mediating the import, export and re-distribution of cargoes. This will be done by considering the accessibility of the outer Claudian basin to ships arriving by sea, the direction of currents and winds moving around the Claudian and Trajanic basins, possible networks of water and land-based connections throughout the port, and the efficiency of the canals and the Tiber in the movement of naves caudicariae between Portus and Rome