Featured Graduate Student Research: Sarah Wilker

During the summer of 2019, I traveled to Marzamemi, Sicily to complete my project “Seaborn Ceramics: A Study of Late Antique Amphoras in Sicily.” This field research was carried out as part of my continued work on the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project. The project is a collaborative research initiative between the Sicilian Soprintendenza del Mare (superintendent of the sea), Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples, and Stanford University. It combines survey, excavation, and heritage management efforts to explore maritime landscapes and wider connectivity patterns off the southeastern Sicilian coast. For the past several years, research on the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project has focused on a large, Late Roman ship known as the Marzamemi “church wreck,” which wrecked while carrying a sizeable corpus of prefabricated architectural pieces destined for use in the construction of a Byzantine church. Additionally, the project has expanded over the last several years to include an ambitious program of underwater survey along the southeast Sicilian coastline, with the aim of better understanding economic development and wider networks of connectivity in the area during the Roman period.

While the shipwreck is best known for its architectural finds, the ship was also carrying a significant corpus of ceramic vessels, including at least 70 maritime transport jars known as amphoras. These jars would have been filled with wine, olive oil, or other organic materials that needed to be transported from one place to another via ship. Over the past several years, my research on the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project has centered not on the large architectural cargo but on these amphoras, as well as several smaller ceramic assemblages found during underwater survey. My program of research aims not only to shed light on the non-architectural cargo, but also hopes to contextualize the “church wreck” and its crew within the social, political, and economic landscapes in which they lived.

“Seaborne Ceramics”: 2019 Fieldwork

During the 2019 field season, support from The Europe Center allowed me to complete my research project “Seaborne Ceramics: A Study of Late Antique Amphoras in Sicily." This project built on my fieldwork from previous summers, and was grounded in a significant amount of data collection from past excavation seasons, including systematic recording the excavated amphoras through technical drawing and photography. My project this summer built from this data and focused more on analysis, specifically the identification of as many of the amphora forms and types as possible from both the “church wreck” assemblage and from survey assemblages. Additionally, this project also included macroscopic studies of the amphoras’ “fabric,” which is the clay and pieces of rocks and minerals contained within it that together make up the jar. This research was geared towards a better understanding of the diverse array of production sites used to make the amphoras on the “church wreck” as well as those found during survey.

After studying the amphoras found on the wreck and comparing them to amphoras found in other shipwreck cargos and at production sites on dry land, I was able to show that the ship was carrying jars from a variety of production sites, including mainland Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, and North Africa. I was also able to confirm that out of all of the amphoras on the ship, over 50% of them were the same type of jar, known as the Late Roman 2 amphora, which was predominately made in mainland Greece and dates to the early 4th – early 7th century AD. All of these Late Roman 2 jars appeared to be made in the same fabric, which may suggest that the group of jars was produced at the same production site. A collection of over 70 amphora lids made in this same fabric further supports the idea that this group of amphoras was produced in one place. My work with the amphoras from the underwater survey compliments this picture. Analysis revealed jars coming from North Africa, Greece, Italy, Gaza, and several other places in Europe and the Mediterranean. This diverse array of production areas shows that the southeast coast of Sicily was a central node in the wider landscape of Late Roman trade and economic interaction.

Conclusion

My fieldwork in Marzamemi this summer afforded me the opportunity to collect a wealth of new information on amphoras from the “church wreck”and the southeast coast of Sicily more generally. I can now begin to think about the places the ship may have traveled in Europe and the Mediterranean, and the possible objectives of the ship and its crew for carrying not only the large assemblage of architectural elements but also this smaller assemblage of amphoras. Having completed this research, I can now work to better understand the motivations and choices of those traveling by ship during Late Antiquity and lives they may have led.

Sarah Wilker is a PhD candidate in Classical Archaeology.