Transcript

Shipping Stone for Justinian's Empire? with Justin Leidwanger

From ArchaeologyTV · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 2 min · 10,509 words · 81 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Shipping Stone for Justinian's Empire? with Justin Leidwanger", an episode of ArchaeologyTV published October 23, 2025 (1 h 2 min, about 10,509 words). It mentions 10 people, works and ideas, including Justinian, AIA, Kiara Sriio, David Gibbons, Gearhard Capitan.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Justinian, David Gibbons, Kiara Sriio
  2. – 20:00: Justinian, Gearhard Capitan, Marsammy shipwreck
  3. – 30:00: Justinian
  4. – 40:00: Justinian
  5. – 50:00: Amazon, Ben Russell
  6. – 1:00:00: Ghard Cap, Polarmo

Notable quotes from "Shipping Stone for Justinian's Empire? with Justin Leidwanger"

  • By Justin Lidwinganger from Stanford University. The title is Shipping Stone for Justinian's Empire. question mark.
    about Justinian · at
  • Enough that it became one of the 12 wrecks that wrote the history of the world through which David Gibbons wrote a history of the world last year in his really quite…
    about David Gibbons · at
  • The great pioneers of underwater archaeology, a man by the name of Gearhard Capitan, who passed away about a little over 10 years ago, was in the area and was had been working in Sicily.
    about Gearhard Capitan · at
  • Brown suggested? Where do they intersect with it in different ways? And the Marsammy shipwreck, this church wreck provides, I think, a really fascinating glimpse into this…
    about Marsammy shipwreck · at
  • It's just you can the work of Ben Russell is I turned somebody to the work of Ben Russell on this who's one of who's worked with us on this project. but you don't see a lot of.
    about Ben Russell · at
  • Yeah, I the Amazon truck here is Yeah, it's it's certainly making a bunch of stops. if for no other reason than provisioning. we have a couple of water jars from the.
    about Amazon · at
  • And then it moved to Oxford and then it was in Bon I think in Germany for a while then back to Polarmo and so they made some reconstruction some really excellent ones from that…
    about Polarmo · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Justinian — Person · 12 mentions · first at
  • Kiara Sriio — Person · 1 mention · first at
    It's great to see all of your welcome messages in the chat from all over. My name is Kiara Sriio and I am here in Nashville, Tennessee. I am the treasurer of the AIA chapter…
  • David Gibbons — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Gearhard Capitan — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Ben Russell — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Ghard Cap — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Used one of those but some of the line drawings of things are based on what Ghard Cap had done, but we've updated and changed things because the decoration is actually a little…

Companies & orgs

  • AIA — Company · 5 mentions
  • Amazon — Company · 1 mention · first at

Concepts & topics

Places & events

Full transcript with timestamps

All right, it looks like it's 7 o'clock here in central time, so I'm going to get us started. Welcome everyone to the AIA Archaeology Hour. It's great to see all of your welcome messages in the chat from all over. My name is Kiara Sriio and I am here in Nashville, Tennessee. I am the treasurer of the AIA chapter here in Nashville and I am also a lecturer here at Vanderbilt University in the department of classical and Mediterranean studies. Um, thanks for being here tonight. Uh, we are here tonight to hear a talk by Justin Lidwinganger from Stanford University. The title is Shipping Stone for Justinian's Empire. question mark.

Um, but before we get started and I introduce him, I just want to take a moment to talk a little bit about the AIA. Uh, obviously you can see this slide in front of you with all of our, uh, contact information and social media. So, please follow us online. Um, let's see. Let's see if I can get my slides to go. Okay. So, um obviously the AIA is North America's largest and oldest archaeological organization. We do a lot of programming and publications that are meant to support the work of all the people you see listed on the slide. Um, some of the programs and publications that we produce include Archaeology magazine that I'm sure a number of you are familiar with. We also publish the American Journal of Archaeology if you're interested in taking a deeper dive into recent research in the field.

There are also other ways that we um involve you, our members, in the world of archaeology through excavations. You can find on our list online. You can attend lectures like this one tonight or other events organized by our local societies. Um and of course there are travel opportunities sponsored by the AIA around the world as well. Um, we encourage you if you are not already a member to become a member and to join us. You can um hopefully scan the QR code on this screen in front of you. Oh, can you hear me? Okay. Oh, I see it's not a message for me. Sorry about that. Um, let me keep going then. And here's a few of the benefits of membership. Um, you are eligible to apply for grants and fellowships. You can be affiliated with a local society and meet some uh like-minded members of the community who are interested in archaeology. You can serve on AIA committees. Um, there's discounts and of course subscriptions to

the publications as well. Let's see what happened. Okay. Um, oh, I'm going this way. Um, I feel like I skipped a slide. Ah, yes. Here we go. Please also consider supporting us financially. We are a nonprofit and we rely, as it says, on the generosity of donors to support all of these wonderful programs. So, you can also scan the QR code to find more information about how to donate if you wish. We have a number of exciting upcoming virtual lectures. Obviously, we have Justin here tonight with us. Next month, we'll have Allison Futrell, who I believe will be talking about the Roman Arena. Um, I love her work on that topic. And then you can see some other great um speakers that will be coming in the new year. You can also watch recordings of these uh talks after um the fact on YouTube. So keep an eye out for those.

Um so as I mentioned today we have Justin speaking to us from Stanford University. We'll have Allison uh like I said next month from University of Arizona talking about the people's arena. Um and just a friendly reminder that there is no recording allowed of uh this talk. Um this is a live presentation and we ask that you respect the intellectual property of the presenter tonight. So thank you for your cooperation with that. Um one last other kind of technical matter here, practical matter is just your Zoom setting tips. you are able to mute the chat popups um by following the instructions below. Um and at the end of the talk, we'll have time for a Q&A.

Please uh use the separate Q&A box and not the chat to submit your questions which I will then uh deliver to Justin. If you can do that, that would be wonderful. Thank you so much. Okay. So, talking about our um presenter tonight, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen for a moment. Um let me give him a proper introduction. Justin Lidwinger is an associate professor in the department of classics at Stanford University. He is also faculty in the oceans department at Stanford's door school of sustainability and he is the head of the maritime archaeology and digital heritage lab at the Stanford archaeology center both in the field and in the lab. His work focuses on Mediterranean mobilities interaction and maritime heritage. He has helped lead surveys and excavations most recently off the coasts of Turkey and Sicily and there his work has included um an investigation of the very broad marzamei maritime heritage

project. His work on this project included a renewed investigation of the famous early 6th century CE church wreck which is what his talk tonight again entitled shipping stone for Justinian's empire will be focused on. So please join me in welcoming Justin lineer.

Super. Thanks so much Kiara. Let me share my own screen here and that that and I'm hoping it is now fully visible to you all. Great. Super. No, thank you Kiara for the for the nice introduction for to both the AIA as a whole and and and to me. I appreciate it. And as I hope many people will see throughout this presentation and especially at the end, the AIA is sort of all over this project. Um, from people who are involved in the AIA being there to the initial some of the initial funding that got us started coming from the AIA to it being published in archaeology magazine and in Aja as well. So, it's sort of very much an AIA project in many ways.

And I I appreciate as well the opportunity to to sort of present this work, both kind of the excavation and what we did in the field, but also what we've done for the past few years uh of kind of ongoing research associated with this site. Research that's helped us try to understand and rewrite our understanding of this wreck. And at the same time, one small piece of the history of a really interesting period that we think we know as late antiquity. one of the to to sort of get ahead of myself a little bit, the question mark at the end of this is of course, you know, one of the one of the uh one of the major drivers behind our investigation of this shipwreck.

And it's a wreck that as as some of you may know was sank off the southeast tip of Sicily and is really well known by architectural historians, art historians, classical archaeologists, maritime archaeologists. It's famous enough that it became one of the 12 wrecks that wrote the history of the world through which David Gibbons wrote a history of the world um last year in his in his really quite best-selling book. Um, I don't agree with everything in it, but it's a really exciting book and I'd encourage many of you to read it. But what I'd like to do is to show you tonight in 30 minutes how it is that we kind of rethink our understanding of a shipwreck. How it is that we can kind of revisit a site with new questions, a new understanding of a period and really drive forward our understanding of the past. Archaeologists don't, of course, discover simple facts. We work with the data we have to present the best

understanding of the period we can. And as our understanding of periods change, we learn more. We have more shipwrecks, different sites, new texts, our un that forces us to understand and to change our understanding of a period. So I want to walk you through a little bit of that process. And to do that, I want to start with the original excavation of this shipwreck. The site off southeast Sicily was discovered certainly by the early 20th century. Possibly it was known earlier than that, but really it was reported um and caught on with the scholarly community and a community of local divers um really in the late 1950s when it was reported by a fisherman to the archaeological authorities that there were there were pieces of marble with carved Christian iconography lying on the seabed off this southeast tip of the island of Sicily. Fortunately, one of the great pioneers of underwater archaeology, a man by the name of

Gearhard Capitan, who passed away about a little over 10 years ago, was in the area and was had been working in Sicily. And he came in and led investigations and salvage excavations and more scientific work that helped put this site on the map. So it's really his his efforts that that helped create this as a as and add this to the scholarly landscape. And what he found were a whole ser it's located in shallow water. So many of the pieces were not very well preserved. It ranges from about 4 m deep to about 8 m deep. And he found many of the things you see here. Sh little bits of aas and other ceramics. Some bits of metal concretion. The wood itself from a ship disintegrates completely at this depth and in this exposure to the elements, but the little bits of metal formed concretions and these were preserved. And he found at the middle in the middle of this slide, you see uh a a fineware plate with a figure with a

praying figure on it. Something something that some have interpreted as a figure of Christ. So we have already kind of a religious association with this. But what he found most famously in this site was the cargo, a series of columns, capitals and bases in marble, as well as distinctive furnishings for the interior decoration of a Christian church. This of course gave the wreck its name, the church wreck. These he dated roughly to the early to mid6th century based on compar based on comparisons with other kind of an art historical view of of of our understanding of church architecture.

And he found excavating in the middle of the site 28 capitals almost that number of bases and the columns were mostly broken so it was unclear but he suggested they were probably 28 as well. So he was looking he was thinking about a set of 28 columns with their capitals and bases along with pieces of a church including the pulpit which you see a reconstruction of on the upper right here. This is from the Allard Pearson Museum and an exhibit they made a few years ago that was really quite fabulous in which some material from our shipwreck um traveled.

But so pieces of the pulpit there as well as the screen what we call the chancel screen separating the the congregation from the most sacred space within the church. Now Capitan's understanding of this shipwreck was really strongly influenced by of course our understanding of the period in which it was sailing at the time in the 1950s 1960s. Our understanding of this period, the sixth century in particular, in what we think of as what we call late antiquity was really one of decline. It was described as this that period of the fall of Rome.

And I give you just an example in the upper right, right? Like when we think about the this period, many of the first things that came to mind at least at the time were barbarian raids, plagues, division war poverty strife these sorts of problems. um religious strife and the like and fragmentation of a Mediterranean that used to be unified under the Roman Empire. So this period was once seen as one of just sort of the decline and fall of Rome. So Capitan struggled to figure out how it is that you reconcile 100 tons the weight of this garden 100 tons of architectural material finally carved in marble with this picture of decline and fall. How do you put these two together? The date in the sixth century allowed him to connect it to one individual, the most famous emperor from this period, an emperor by the name of Justinian who reigned from 527 to 565. So kind of a broad reign.

And he is, of course, many of you will know, if you know one early Byzantine emperor, you will know him. And the reason it was so easy to attach this shipwreck to Justinian was first the date seemed about right. And second, Justinian is has long been seen as representing a a sort of a a reverse in the trajectory of an otherwise downward spiral of Rome's fading empire. Justinian reunified large parts of the empire. He he revised the administrative system, the law system. He we saw we see new new wealth moving around um stability. He attempted to unify religiously as well the empire. And so for Capitan, Justinian represented an obvious person to attach this wreck to.

Right here we have a period of decline, fragmentation, fall. And instead we can say Justinian. We we can say Justinians in this shipment represents kind of that brief period in which things are reversing that trajectory is reversing. So he interpreted this shipwreck the church wreck as something of the early to mid6th century this prefabricated set of columns capitals and bases. basically a set of materials that would have been shipped to to build or renovate a church in Justinian's newly reconquered empire. As he's reconquering the Roman Empire, he's rebuilding things. We have texts that tell us about his efforts to rebuild. So, it slotted very nicely into this narrative. So, of course, Capitan also suggested it was sponsored by and associated with the emperor himself. Now, all of this makes sense for the 1960s, 1970s.

What's changed over the last 50 years, though, is our understanding of this period entirely. Instead of thinking about late antiquity, that period from roughly the 4th century, some might put it earlier to certainly the seventh, maybe even the eighth century, is instead of thinking about it as decline and just the kind of fading glimpses of the Roman world, we now think about it as one of really kind of vibrant transformation. We see lots of people moving around. We see new artistic styles and architectural styles. We see new wealth, new social relationships, new connections. So, it's sort of a vibrant different world, a a more diverse series of states and and regions interacting with each other across the Mediterranean. And we look at it in a very different way than we did 50 years ago. A lot of that has to do with the very important work by the uh by a scholar uh historian by the name of

Peter Brown. So of course as our understanding of this period changes so too must our reckoning and our understanding of where these different pieces of archaeology fit and what part of this world they should fit into. How do they challenge what it is that Peter Brown suggested? Where do they intersect with it in different ways? And the Marsammy shipwreck, this church wreck provides, I think, a really fascinating glimpse into this period because it's one of the last gigantic ships from the ancient world. In the Roman world, we saw we see ships get much bigger than the small caros of a few tons to 20 tons. They get up to hundreds of tons, if not more than a thousand tons. the church. Many of those large ships are actually marble carriers carrying large blocks of stone to clad the hall the walls of Roman baths and the like. The church wreck fits at kind of the tail end of those large ships 100 tons. Um,

so thinking 30 to plus meter ship, probably 100 tons and probably one of the last of those ships that was carrying just a kind of large-scale stone cargo on its own. The other reason we wanted to reinvestigate this site was because it pieces of it were being removed. Um, illicitly it was a protected site. The local diving community was doing a lot to protect it, but at the same time, a lot of material was being removed slowly and these were being recovered by the Coast Guard and various other organizations. And so in an effort to save it, what we had what we did was to undertake an excavation in association with the Superintendent of Delm Mar, the authority governing underwater cultural heritage in Sicily. That project started with survey in 2013 and continued for seven years of excavation. It was a partnership of the superintend Stanford Brock University and then a the University of Naples as well. And I want

to show you kind of what we did because our work many of you will probably not know how this works but our work sort of tried to build very directly on what Ghard Copyon was doing. We re-exavated where he had been working in the middle of the site and worked our way out. And it's a it was very tough going because it's in shallow water as you can see here, only four to 8 m deep. Some material landed up on the reef at 4 m deep. Other things fell down into a into kind of a large sandy area at about 8 m deep. And then much of the surrounding reef collapsed on top of the edges of the site. So, we knew that there were things that Capitan had missed because he simply couldn't have moved all of the material around the uh the edges of the site.

That means moving heavy objects. On the upper right here, you'll see a part of a the diver is sort of touching a a chunk of a column that's under one piece of rock that's under a like a 12 ton piece of the reef that's collapsed down on top of it. So, the logistics of this were were complicated, as you can imagine. But what we needed to do was to try to understand the whole assemblage, not just the archaeological, not just the architectural cargo. See how much more of the architectural cargo was there, but also what other objects were part that might help us understand the assemblage as a whole. So I give you some images here of that process digging into the reef. Um, we used water dredges which pump water down from the surface and create suction and allow us to kind of remove the sand slowly out of the way. And you can see here some of the uncovering of both larger and smaller fines in embedded deep sometimes within

this reef. Um, a few more pictures. Many of the ceramics managed to wedge their way deep in these gullies that we had to so we had to kind of unpack the reef to get to them. On the left you see sort of a upside down column capital or at least partially on its side um just to the left of the divers. And of course, you know, these things are heavy. So, um, our shout outs to to a number of technical partners who helped us move many of these things. Um, lighter things are easy enough to move. Things are fortunately lighter underwater. Um, but not that light in this. And many of these pieces weigh se anywhere from several hundred um pound several hundred kilos up to nearly a ton, one ton.

Outside of the water, logistically, this is obviously very challenging process as well. the storage rema keeping these things in in fresh water to remove the salts to clean and to stabilize these for long-term storage for eventual display. Um and here we're grateful to our partners both the superintendent delare and also the kimune of Pino where we work for the space um and the partnership there much of our interpretation of this site depends on very precise um mapping and spatial relationships among different objects.

Um so we of course had to rely on very detailed um photoggramometry underwater to get us kind of sub um centimeter accuracy across a very large site as we're tracking objects and their movement um over the course of many centuries from one part to another. So what did we find our work? Of course we knew that G Capitan had only excavated part of this site. So we expected to find more columns, capitals and bases. We expected to find more small finds as well. And indeed we did. How many though and how they match is a really important part of the story. We ended up at the last count. Um and there are some things are not terribly well preserved. I think we have about 35 capitals. So more than the 28 that Capitan had noticed and some of which he had excavated, some of which he had left. Somewhere around 33 bases. 32 33 maybe a few more. It's unclear though if we have the same number of columns,

capitals and bases and an unknown number of columns because these are very fragmentaryary. So how can we deal with that problem? Well, one of the things that jumped out at us first is that we have way too many than will fit on the interior of a basilica style church of the appropriate size for these kinds of materials. It would just be too many. It's too long a gallery, too many things um for it. So, we're dealing with not only one set of church, but possibly more pieces. Um how did we analyze these? Well, we went about trying to figure out where they're from and what stages of production they were at because you can see in the lower center here, they're sort of carved, but not fully carved. Um we know thanks to work of uh stable isotope analysis and in particular Scott Pike's work that um that most of this material came from quaries near Constantinople near the imperial capital uh the Proynesian

quaries which you see in the upper left here. These are not the same capitals obviously or pieces. These are examples that were left in the quaries and they some of them have markings of uh quarry marks that tell us about the the teams that put these together. And we know about what stage they're at in the export process. They're about, you know, 80% to 90% done in that export. At least the capitals are. The columns themselves are a little bit less finished. There was more work to be done with those. So, we can kind of evaluate this. What else do do we have alongside this? Well, I want to bring out more ex more pieces of the other art decorative furnishings, not just columns, capitals, and bases, but pieces of the pulpit you see here in a particular green stone that's from inland northern Greece from an area of Thessala quaries called Verde Antico.

It's kind of a modeled green. There's some dark gray green and white veins in. It's a very striking stone, difficult to carve. And you can see this deep carving that would have made it a very very um sort of imposing central feature of a religious structure. You can see here as well the panels. We have both kind of pure colonets, these sort of pillisters with a a small column on top. You see in the lower left the pillister part of it combined with screen panels which you see one of in the lower right here. Partially finished. um not fully finished but much of the carving is is on it. These would have been assembled into this kind of partition for use within the church as well. There are other sculpted finds as well including pieces of an altar table that um I'm grateful to Allison Kidd who see whose um suggestion we're testing now to see if it's seems to be a could very well be from western Turkey from

the area of Athesis. So smaller finds as well as part of that decorative collection of materials. So we have not only one set of materials, we have more than will fit in one church we think and sources from kind of all around the Aian in fact. As I said before that we have too many columns, capitals and bases for one interior. So, are we thinking are we talking about a second building, a second structure, something else associated with the same religious complex, maybe another part of a religious complex as well, but it becomes much less obviously that church in a box, right? It's much less clearly that IKEA style flat pack Justinian shipped out to his newly reconquered empire church, right? So we have the this the story gets much more complicated as soon as you start thinking about it as not just an that flat IKEA flat pack style questions emerge about well who's behind all of this it's not just you know are we

thinking is it still kind of sponsorship from the imperial center that has to be the emperor and his cohort or could this be a local initiative in fact a few different local aristocrats bishops building both sacred and potentially also secular um structures with this. The columns, capitals, and bases could be used for a lot of different things. So, it starts to raise all sorts of different possibilities for our understanding. Now, the challenge is trying to figure out what to do with these materials, right? They don't come with instructions. So trying to understand how many we have. We don't quite know yet how many columns for example, but we've we undertook and have completed a a program of 3D scanning of the hundreds of architectural materials. So we have 3D models we can start to reassemble um into a digital database and start fitting together. Um, we have examples, ideal examples that we can compare

things to so we can fit the small fragmentaryary grubby bits into and understand and put them into their context. And it allows us to kind of virtually reunify the cargo. Some of the material excavated by Ghard Capitan is in storage in Syracuse in Sicily and our own materials elsewhere in Sicily. So, we need to be able to reunite these virtually to understand the complete picture. A couple other things we're doing um with these are are some are to to uh in an effort to understand better the the the process by which these have moved across the seabed. As I said, some of them were probably on top of the reef and then fell into the central sandy part. We've worked with marine biologists from the University of Rome to understand how the the different critters that have bored into them and built concretion on top of them. How those have the the record of concretion on this, how it can tell us what side

was up, how deep it was, whether it was shaded or sandy, whether it was exposed or covered, and how many times they may have moved. So we can reconstruct some of the um depositional and post- depositional processes of the shipwreck through the kind of biological record of this sort of benthic community formation. That's it. This is our one element of our current work. It's very exciting to to to sort of see it go back and forth. Um in this we also attempted to replicate some of these materials to understand how much labor was put in at different stages.

The thing that I have learned with this is that I'm not good at carving capitals, but it at least gives you a sense of well, how many hours were invested in this? How many people would have been required? And the answer is a few dozen for probably the better part of two years, the labor of that many individuals was lost when this ship went down. And it raises questions about whether that cargo would have actually whether the project would have been completed or not. So, we have something a little bit different here, right? more columns than can fit, possibly a second um a second assemblage. And in fact, we now know that this kind of style of columns, capitals, and bases are probably a little early for Justinian.

Um so we might be thinking about a date that's very slightly earlier. What's really critical here is looking at the other materials that are part of the shipwreck, not just the architecture that has really gained the attention of art historians and archaeologists. So what else do we find that helps us understand this? Well, one of the among the finds are pigments. We think they're orpint and rialgar. They're two um arsenic sulfides that are used for as colorants for wall painting. If you have seen those sort of late antique brilliant golds and reds, these are the colors that are or at least some of the colors that are behind them.

These are sometimes used as personal for um for uh for individual use but very often when we have larger amounts we think of them as pigments. So we might actually be have see here pigments moving alongside or colorants moving alongside other decorative elements. In fact we have other decorative elements here. We find raw brown glass. Um and here I'm grateful to Ian Freestone for identifying as Egyptian brown glass. um raw un unused obviously to be melted down into something whether that's inlay of some sort, lamps, some other object.

But we have raw materials, not just the decorative materials of a church of that of the architecture, but we have other parts of the decorative process. And my favorite pieces are at the lower right here are two little pieces of of mosaic, large tile mosaic that I think were being shipped as samples. Um, they're the only polished finished bits we have from the shipwreck and they give I think they were being shipped as samples to give somebody a potential customer a sense of what the aesthetic properties of these materials might be so they could think about a future order. So we start to see not just that kind of center to periphery kind of imposition church in a box model but we in fact see a lot of negotiation a lot of decisionmaking and a lot more complexity multiple building projects and potentially multiple different stages working alongside each other.

Unfortunately we have very little of the ship itself remaining. We have just some concretions. But even these little bits give us an interesting view. To make a long story short, we don't we have very small dimensions of timbers to judge from the the concretions themselves. It suggests this is not a massively purpose-built boat or massive or purpose-built boat. This is any normal merchant vessel that they happen to load an extraordinarily heavy and dense cargo onto. We have bits of of sheathing for the outside of the ship that suggest it had a very long life and may have been and may have been compromised in in various ways in such that you know it it it may not have been in the prime of its life that is we also have ceramics of course on many shipwrecks from the ancient world we have ceramics our galley assemblage here I'm grateful to um uh Andrew Donnelly who's done most of the work on this as

well as Sarah Wilker um who've been looking at these materials and trying to understand what it is people are cooking, how many people are involved. And in fact, what we see are materials that suggest again like some of the some of the capitals and and other decorative materials, maybe something slightly earlier than Justinian, but also very humble in a lot of ways. Um enough dining wares for 8 to 12 sailors, which would be about right. um and mismatched. Similar shapes, but mismatched, suggesting that potentially um uh individual sailors brought their own kit on board and would dine out of a simple shallow dish. And we also have a secondary cargo of wine or oil. I suspect it's oil. Um, and here I'm grateful to um, James Gross who's done some of the petetrographic analysis of our aeras of these jars to figure out that they mostly come from central Greece um, from the Argalid area. And here we have not just of course the sho

the the church in a box moving by itself, but we in fact have a secondary cargo that's go moving alongside this suggesting these materials are not just moving as part of a purpose-built uh ship and a an an imperial message um to the empire, but rather it's moving along the regular commercial circuits in this case alongside a commercial cargo. So we have a much more complex picture. we can see here coming together as part of this shipwreck. Thanks to not just attention to how many and the diversity in the most famous part of the cargo, but all the small finds surrounding all of this that tell us not just about the final voyage, but in fact where sailors may have been in their previous lives, where the ship may have been on its last journey. And we this points to connections to the eastern Mediterranean to as far as Egypt, different parts of the Aian, North Africa and the like. So we can start to see all of those dynamic

connections that are part of a new understanding of late antiquity coming together and kind of overlapping in this sort of shipwreck. Now ultimately we we face this question of where was it headed um when it sank. It's one of the more frustrating ones when you have a shipwreck. Um G and there are many possibilities. Here are some certainly Capitan had suggested originally that North Africa made the most sense because and for a variety of reasons. One, the location of the wreck made made some sense, but also that it was one of the first reconquered parts of of of the Byzantine Empire early under Justinian's reign. So it made sense that the building program would take off there.

I'm skeptical of that for a variety of reasons. Um, and in fact, our best parallels come from places like the northern Adriatic. I give you a church, the Senapolinari Novo at Ravena, which is roughly is both chronologically very similar and also um structurally very similar to it's the kind of church that would have used these sorts of materials. In fact, the columns, capitals, and bases are the same size and and same style as we find on the Mars shipwreck. So I I can improve it, but I suspect we're looking at something like that. But what this allows us to do is to say something to offer a different model for the uh for this sort of shipwreck. We yes we have furnishings for church interior but larger numbers of elements different kinds of elements suggest not only one building program one IKEA style church but other building programs to come possibly multiple building programs or multiple parts of a

building program together in one cargo. The date suggests in fact that it's probably pre- Justinianic. It could be early in Justinian's reign, but some of the dates suggest that it works just as well or even better in the first quarter or first few decades of the sixth century before Justinian's reconquest. So suddenly as soon as we think about this, we think all right, this is m this is indicative of a much more flourishing period that doesn't necessarily depend solely on one emperor and solely on one limited u period of resurgence or reunification. In fact, we can see all of the Mediterranean flourishing in different ways at different times. And this is just part of it. We don't require Justinian here. We can see earlier journeys in the lives of these sailors, future journeys in the orders to be placed for the glass, for the revetment, for next decorative stages, suggesting that this is just one of many

ships moving around and one of many journeys that would have been involved in these projects. We can see the everyday merchant interaction happening within a shipwreck like this through its cargo and the commercial uh the commercial goods the olive oil in those hundred or so amorous and what we see in the end is we don't necessarily need we can think about this as potentially local patronage wealthy aristocrats bishops in Italy potentially North Africa places like this ordering materials and and and stimulating movement and interaction and economic growth on their own without it necessarily coming from the imperial center. And at the end of the day, what I think it tells us or one of the many more important things it tells us is that we start to see the those elite movements of high-end goods moving alongside the everyday connections, the staples and grain, wine, oil that really continue to drive interaction. In a

world where people still want to trade, they still want to communicate despite the fact that there is political fragmentation, despite the fact that the Rome the world is not unified under Rome anymore. But many of these different regions continue to flourish and continue to connect with each other. And this is what we see in this cargo. Now, in one minute, I simply want to show you kind of what we've been doing with some of the heritage end of of this project. And this is really the work done in in concert with my partners at at Federico Saga University of Naples as well as my my my colleague uh and partner Liz Green at at Brock University to transform the space in which we're working into a museum of the sea in this small town that'll that'll tell the story of one town's um relationship to kind of between the land and the sea.

Immersive exhibits, large scale exhibits that require things from underwater take many years. So, in the meantime, what we've worked on is a series of things that will bring people to objects and bring the story out into the public, including through dive trails, preserving these sites and opening them up to the public. The Superintendza Delm Mari does a remarkable job in try in opening these sites to the public and you can dive and visit another two other marble wreck marble carrying Roman wrecks right near the church wreck in fact. Um but we've also undertaken sort of popup exhibits to bring these out to bring the story of the church wreck out into the public so people understand what is off the coast, what's lying off the shore um right near them. So this we've connected them into kind of heritage trails trying to trying to get people to wander through the landscape and kind of encounter these different um

shipwrecks even outside of the water here. Um whether that's digitally or with physical popups as you go. And I'll leave it at that and I simply want to thank um you all for being here. I want to thank my colleagues. There's a long list of people. Obviously this work is expensive and requires a huge amount of of buyin. We've had a remarkable team throughout. Um I I I promised I would mention the AIA connections. I I should mention that um Liz Green, the AIA president, um my partner is is took me not only was was part of this excavation and and really coordinated a lot of the heritage work um but also took the vast majority of the nice underwater photos you see and is currently um doing French homework with our 12-year-old um so that I can be here with you. Um but also I want to highlight if you look part of the way down with support from you'll see the archaeological institute of America's coats and excavation grant

which was a generous grant that allowed us to undertake the first season show that this project was worth doing and that in turn led to the rest of the funding. So really this project has been an AIA project through and through and with that let me stop and I'm eager to hear questions and and and input from everyone. Okay, wonderful. Thank you very much, Justin. Really fascinating underwater archaeology. Just an incredible world into itself. Um, so just sort of you spoke just briefly about at the end about exhibiting the material. a question um was asking about when and then would there be any plans to put together the um materials from Capitan's um digs with your own at any point?

Sure. It's ideally that should be the case. Um administratively they're handled by two different departments with for cultural heritage. though logistically it's slightly complicated and moving them is not always the best idea but ultimately eventually it it should happen and and I think it's likely to happen but for the moment what's most important I think for us is to be able to reunite them digitally um so that we can both test our hypotheses but also offer different ways of interacting with these the digital models give us in especially in connection with the physical materials allow us all sorts of new ways of interacting with this

great well on a related qu a related question is can you just say a bit more about the dive trails maybe what

Sure that's about you all of you if you're a divers should should visit Sicily um there the supreenza delmare uh which is the superintendency of the sea uh is is has been really at the forefront for Sicily has been really at the forefront for in bringing people to the archaeological ical sites underwater as well as not just on land where many of you can visit easily. But um thanks to the the the hard work of a of a colleague of mine Sebastian Otusa who passed away in 20 uh 2019 um he started this project with us and he was a superintendent of the sea but he was determined to bring people to these. So they've tested you can go and you can visit a series of sites in shallow water. You can do slightly deeper dives. There are snorkel trails you can do. You can in different parts of the island to sort of and come with little plastic booklets or look on the surface, read on the surface and then

dive in. There are digital ways of exploring these with computers underwater. There are different ways you can explore these from your own computer even though you can't go underwater. So there have been there a whole series of dive trails set up by the soandenza in order to allow people to visit these and that allows us to what we'd ultimately like to do is to actually do some reconstruction of different parts of the site that we've excavated underwater as a new um site a new centerpiece for kind of diving tourism even though we've removed some of the materials to replace them with replicas using the digital models as a base.

Right. Very cool. I love that idea. Um, so pivoting slightly, but a question that I got from two different people was, um, I will just sort of read out what one person says because I don't think I can paraphrase it any better. Given their vast shipping experience um and understanding breakage trends on long voyages, would it make sense that they would ship spares to avoid delays or that some of this material would be like extra in case of damage for um the construction of a maybe a single

basilica? Sure. No, it's a it's a that's one of the things we considered is that, you know, do you want extras is sort of the question for the reasons that that this person's pointing out. One of the the advantage of course of carving more of these materials or going farther in the carving process before you shipment is that before you ship them is that you can concentrate really skilled labor in quaries and in workshops and crank them out. The downside of it is the more you've invested in it, if it's lost or if it's damaged in shipment or the ship sinks, um the more sunk cost you have literally and metaphorically, right? Um so one possibility is that they are actually shipping extras. We but I'm I'm doubtful that that there would be this many of them and we we don't see a lot of stockpiling um in the ancient world.

Uh it's just you can the work of Ben Russell is I turned somebody to the work of Ben Russell on this who's one of who's worked with us on this project. Um but you don't see a lot of production of extras in order to uh to to kind of just have some on hand to advance the process. Certainly not in the Roman world, probably not in the late antique world either, but um it is one possibility um out there. So, none of them seem to be we don't think that they're damaged. There's a possibility that they may be at slightly different stages of carving a couple different sets of these. This is where the digital models help us, but still to be discovered and it's a good it's it's a good reminder not to, you know, to to keep that hypothesis on the table too.

Great. Thanks. Um, somebody asked, "Is it possible the ship would be making multiple stops because there are a variety of goods it seems or at least more than seems needed for one structure perhaps?"

Could you hypothesize that this is like going to be stopping and dropping off a variety of deliveries along its route?

Yeah, I I you know, the the Amazon truck here um is Yeah, it's it's certainly making a bunch of stops. um if for no other reason than provisioning. Um we we have a couple of water jars from the ship. Um rims of water jars, not terribly well preserved, but comparing them with better preserved ones allows us to estimate about how much water they could probably carry in a couple of water jars. And if we compare that with how much people need and a crew of let's say 8 10 or 12 people suggests people are they're stopping every few days um when they I suspect that they picked up the aeras that we see with almost certainly containing olive oil in southern Greece before ending heading west. Um so that's probably an opportunistic cargo being picked up. So spec there are certainly the reality that people are stopping every few every few days if not more more um more frequently than that. Now when it comes

to delivering cargos entirely possible the kinds of columns capitals and bases those could those could find a home in many different building programs in many different not just religious but other types of structures. Um so they could they could be used in any of a number of different contexts. The ambo, the pulpit is a very particular and very high-end object and and probably has a very specific destination in in mind that is certainly a church and and a very nice one at that. But one of the most interesting aspects of of some of the pieces is that like the ambo, this pulpit, the big platform was was cut into two uneven pieces. And there's no good reason to cut it out unless you need to quarry it in two smaller pieces or I suspect cutting it into two pieces meant that it was less than each piece was less than two tons and that's sort of probably the upper limit for a cart. So the idea was

to have all of these materials small enough that you could cart them as well over land and not just keep them in the port, right? So, we get a sense that these could actually have made it to inland sites pretty easily because even though they're big, even though they're expensive, they're fancy. Everything would have been would have fit on a cart or it was cut to fit on a cart. So,

I'm glad you brought that up because a few people have asked, "How do you load and unload

very heavy items um from the ship?" They're not, you know, there are a there are a lot of them, 100 tons of material, but they're not as heavy as you think. The columns are a little over a ton a piece. Um, at, you know, when well preserved, ours are pitted and kind of cracked and broken and grooves and cutting them, so they they don't weigh that much. But when original, when intact, they were a little over a ton a piece probably. Um, but all of that material would fit on a cart. We know that cart loads were up to a, you know, a ton and a half, two tons, something like that. So, I suspect that this is why one of these curious moments that why cut that platform? In fact, they cut it right along one side of a cross that was carved into the lower part of it.

And they cut it off center, I think, so they didn't split the cross, but two pieces that were meant to be joined. There's a dowel hole between them. It was meant to be joined. So, you could actually transport these inland. So even though they're big and this is expensive material, all of it was was sufficiently light that it could be carted. And I suspect all of it was sufficiently light that even some basic cranes in in everyday ports could lift it or you could lift it from the boom and the rigging of the ship itself. One of the two.

Great. Thank you. Um kind of pivoting a little bit. Um uh an earlier question was about the images of the church that you were using in particular. I think those images of the pulpit.

Are those reconstructions that you all have put together of what this space would have looked like or is it a just a similar space that you're using? I know you had some compar um comparative like from Rebana images. Is that stuff that you guys have put together in the visualiz? did not the the 3D reconstruction I used I mentioned it was from the it was from the alloy Pearson museum's exhibition associated with Sicily in the sea there was a storm war and shipwrecks they did an exhibit so some are the material moved to Amsterdam and then it moved to Oxford and then it was in Bon I think in Germany for a while then back to Polarmo um and so they made some reconstruction some really excellent ones from that so I used one of those um but some of the line drawings of things are based on what Ghard Cap had done, but we've updated and changed things because the decoration is actually a little bit

different. So, we've tried to build simply on what other people have done and and continue to use that as much as possible. So,

thank you. Um, let's see here. Um, a couple people have just asked about more about if we can sort of infer why the shipwrecked given the location that it's in, um, the condition of the boat. Is there anything that you can say about why this ship went down and why it went down where it did?

Yeah, that's you know it I can tell you why did it wreck right in this specific spot. I the ra the ship itself was probably to you know had a deep enough draft. It was a big enough vessel that it probably had a meter and a half draft something like that. The seabed is now about four meters deep. In antiquity, it was about a meter, maybe a little more, meter and a half higher. So, 2 and a half meters or so deep. And in high waves, you it would have b it would have been easy to bottom out on this reef. And it's kind of the first shallowest reef you get to um as you're coming in from sea to shore. So it it's it's easily imaginable that in a in stormy conditions this would have bottomed out and been sort of ground out on the reef. Now I suspect that it's you know less than a kilometer from shore. I suspect that some people may have made it to shore. Whether they took stuff with them is an entire different is

entirely possible too. My suggestion that these are these were materials were ultimately going to northern Italy or at least some of these materials northern Mars and mem is not on a straight line from the Aian to northern Italy obviously. Um but we know that people get blown off course. We know that there are additional stops. You know the the most famous example of these is St. Paul who ends up probably in Malta uh you know when was not intending to be there. So, we know people end up, you know, end up in places they don't expect to be, but also that, you know, as you're as you're crossing over there, stops you, additional stops, you make possibly to drop off some cargo to pick up an additional cargo. So, that is also another possibility, but you know, all the pieces are starting to come together, but we still have uh some holes. So, I'm eager to hear.

Uh related question, was there such a thing as shipping insurance at that time? Which I kind of feel like maybe there was, but yeah, I don't know. This might be a beyond your area of expertise but

no, there is there was um shipping insurance in the in the Roman world. We see um holdovers into late antiquity. So you could um in fact insure. We hear about I mean wealthy individuals are kind of spreading their risk and kind of self-insuring. We hear about the um the emperor when there are food shortages in in um in the city of Rome. He offers to underwrite the loss of any vessels that undertake the voyage during the winter um from the imperial purse. We hear about private insurance as well. In fact, there's the suggestion that one of the at Austia there's a there's a group that provides insurance as well. people are insured through their own kind of network of of uh of like-minded or people are who are uh trading in the same kinds of materials. So there is insurance on these things. When this ship went down, it was a big loss to somebody as I think somebody um somebody pointed out in one of the comments.

We've estimated that it was, you know, a few dozen workers for, you know, working long days for the better part of two years. So, it's not it's not, you know, catastrophic, but it may have been expensive enough and it may have been detrimental enough that you wonder whether the project ever was actually finished. Um, you know, it the columns you can't keep building and order another set of columns. They have to go in at a certain point or you can't keep building, right? Um, the ambo, the pulpit you can you can insert later um as long as you have the right opening and and everything else. But some of these things are you wonder whether would have set back by the time you order new ones. You know, we're talking about at least two or three years. So,

yeah. Um, let's see. Maybe just a kind of a a little bit of a lighter question here just about your experiences working underwater. How long can your team members work underwater? What what does that sort of process look like? you speak about maybe some of your personal experience during

Sure. One of the great things about this shipwreck was that we could work for a long time because it it was a huge and there are I mean there are many thousands of artifacts that were that were recovered. So um it was also nice because it was a training one. We had brand new divers, brand new um undergraduate students who had just learned how to dive working with us. um because it was only eight meters deep, you're deep enough that you're not getting knocked around by the waves quite as much, but it's shallow enough that it's you can still do it with with a with a good margin of safety. So, it was a great training excavation, and that's one of the reasons we undertook the project here, but you could really work for quite a while. We had divers working at the height of the excavation.

We had teams working with they would do backtoback um 90minute dives and we would have about a dozen to 14 people in the water on two different on multiple different shifts. So there would be multiple different boats passing each other and dropping new teams of anywhere from 8 to 12 to 14 divers in the water. Um, so it was sort of a um was it was a busy site at its height and we would work from, you know, 8 am till 2 pm or 2:30. Um, so you could do quite a bit. You can in fact stay a long time at the late in late in the excavation campaigns when we were trying to finish up areas. You could spend, you know, we would spend four or five hours at a time sometimes down there. So

Wow. Yeah. You kind of lose track and it's it's sort of zen. It's great. No one can call you, no one can email you.

Yeah, it's very peaceful, I can imagine. And it's um a few questions about technology that y'all are maybe using in the context of the uh excavations. Do you think like there's a pl what are you using? Um I think someone asked about you using some GIS. Um, let me see if I can find the sort of technical terminology about it on on some of your digs that you were working on in Turkey. Um, did were you using some uh Oh, you said you use GIS to model shipwreck distributions. Um, have you used anything like that on this? And then um, you know, is there room for drones, AI, like what's the technological sort of landscape like? I mean, for us, the the biggest challenge was trying to trying to get trying to get a very nice three-dimensional view of the seabed and the entire surrounding area around the reef despite the fact that sand was shifting, columns would move and the like. So that was really

what a lot of our um our work centered on so that we had a good base map from which we could kind of re reverse the environmental processes and trying to figure out well actually this column came from up here. Um so that process is unfolding right now trying to use environmental modeling software to understand how it is that we can use the kind of incrustation to reverse engineer the site as it would have been deposited on the seabed and therefore getting us closer to the boat itself. So

very cool. Um let's see it's 8 o'lock so I think the last question we'll go with is just are you still excavating the site? What are the plans for the future of the site?

Yeah, the site we have finished our excavations of the site. Um the right now it's about conservation storage. The conservation um is finally done. CO challenged some conservation of the materials from underwater takes many years. CO was obviously an interruption, a slight interruption to that. But we finished a conservation we're trying to publish, but we're also trying to we'd like to reconstruct the site digitally and potentially physically as well as a centerpiece for diving tourism to put that back because of course we have removed a dive site. I think necessarily so both for its scientific value but also because it it was being sort of it couldn't be protected effectively. Now we can. So the next stage for me is to is to work with our local partners to re to leverage all the kind of digital documentation we have back into the site as it was deposited on the seabed back into the ship and then translate that

onto the seabed so that everyone here can actually snorkel and see it as well. Yes, I would love to see that happen and I hope it does very soon. So thank you so much Justin. This is fascinating. Really great. um just learning experience and thank you to uh both of our interpreters tonight and we hope that you enjoyed your time here with us. Um again this will be uh posted on YouTube in the near future if you would like to look at all part of it again and thank you all for being here tonight. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Bye.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Shipping Stone for Justinian's Empire? with Justin Leidwanger"?

In order: 0:00 Justinian, David Gibbons, Kiara Sriio; 10:00 Justinian, Gearhard Capitan, Marsammy shipwreck; 20:00 Justinian; 30:00 Justinian; 40:00 Amazon, Ben Russell; 50:00 Ghard Cap, Polarmo.

What is mentioned in this ArchaeologyTV episode?

10 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Justinian, AIA, Kiara Sriio, David Gibbons, Gearhard Capitan, Marsammy shipwreck. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Shipping Stone for Justinian's Empire? with Justin Leidwanger"?

The episode runs 1 h 2 min; the transcript is about 10,509 words in 81 timestamped sections.

More from ArchaeologyTV

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.