Portus Augusti et Traiani
About
Bulldozers building Rome's Fiumicino airport in 1958 struck the hulls of five Roman vessels preserved in the silt of the harbor basin built under Claudius and later expanded under Trajan. The find included three flat-bottomed river barges that ran cargo up the Tiber to Rome, one seagoing merchant ship, and a rare fishing boat fitted with a 300-liter tank to keep its catch alive. Marble and amphorae recovered inside the hulls show these boat types were still working the harbor-to-city supply chain into the early second century CE. The fleet captures the exact logistics of feeding Rome at the height of imperial Portus traffic.
What happened here
A merchantman goes down with everything aboard and the sea keeps most of it. Cargo is usually amphorae — wine, oil, fish sauce — stacked in layers in sand, or roof tiles, or marble in the round, or ingots stamped with the smelter's name. Timbers survive where the mud or the cargo covers them, and the hull shows how it was built: planks edge-joined with mortise and tenon before the frames go in, a way of building that is slow, strong and about to be abandoned. Personal things come up too — a cooking pot, a lamp, coins that date the last voyage to within a few years. Most losses happen in autumn, close inshore, on a coast the crew knew.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →