PALAEOPORTOLOGY: Ancient coastal settlements, ports and harbours

Explore ancient ports at https://www.ancientportsantiques.com/

This project was started in 2010, aiming at collecting, identifying and locating ancient ports and harbours. It led to an extensive Catalogue including thousands of places. Much attention was also devoted from the onset to structural aspects as described by Vitruvius, and as resulting from modern coastal engineering such as design waves and harbour silting-up. Additional attention was devoted to ancient ships and sailing, as they define the harbour needs.

The project is based on a study of around 100 ancient authors and hundreds of modern authors. The considered area spans from Iceland to Sri Lanka. This list includes around 220 Neolithic places, 40 Etruscan ports, 130 Minoan ports, 200 Mycenaean ports, 350 Phoenician ports and thousands of Greek and Roman coastal places. Around 170 “potential ancient harbours” from a nautical point of view, have been added, based on nautical guides/pilots used by modern sailors.

This work is reported in 4 volumes, all available in pdf versions, and most of it is reproduced on the web site (www.AncientPortsAntiques.com) where you can download the complete database as an Excel spreadsheet containing a wealth of information on each site, as well as the KML files for viewing all the locations on Google Earth.

My aim is to guide researchers interested in specific coastal areas with links to relevant and freely accessible publications, as well as links to pages on Pleiades, DARE, Trismegistos, Topostext and Wikipedia. The database of nearly 6,000 ancient places contains 3,670 links to Pleiades pages and 2,000 to 3,000 links to the other websites. The database is enriched almost daily by publications made available on Academia and Research Gate. It should be regarded as an unfinished collection, and the geolocation is sometimes a little speculative. Any further help is welcome: please do not hesitate to contact me with your comments or suggestions.

I rely on a variety of sources and methods, including the Barrington Atlas, to search for potential port sites to include in the database. I intensively use Pleiades once I have a name to enter in the search box. Pleiades is then useful to me for links to Wikipedia, Topostext, etc. and for publications on a given place. The Reference section on each place resource is very useful, even if no direct access to pdf version can be provided there for copyright or availability reasons. The on-going efforts of the Pleiades community to add more precise coordinates than the original ones digitized from the Barrington Atlas and other small-scale maps are most welcome and anything the community can do to accelerate that process would benefit my work and I’m sure that of many others.