ABOUT THE PROJECT

This database was initially conceived as a documentary basis for my Ph.D. thesis, which I discussed in 2016. In 2017-18, thanks to a Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by the Irish Research Council, I had the opportunity to expand and revise my Ph.D. dissertation, turning it into a monograph to which this database was attached as an appendix.

Finally, thanks to the generous support of the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History and the British School at Athens (through the Morrison Memorial Fund for Hellenic Maritime Studies 2018-19), all this information has been merged into an open-access database. At the moment of its online launch, the database contained 194 entries, each one dedicated to a harbour or anchorage on the Aegean or Eastern Ionian coast which was believed to be active between the Archaic and the Classical periods. Unlike its paper version (in Mauro 2019), this online Website is expected to be constantly updated and expanded; eventually, it will cover geographical areas that were not included in the original version.

This database is indebted to the catalogues previously collected by Lehmann-Hartleben (1923); the Navis II Project (2002); Theodoulou (2015) and De Graauw (2017). Compared to other studies, this catalogue offers a list of harbours and havens based on two main factors: the presence of harbour-works dated to the Archaic or Classical periods, and/or their mention in contemporary written sources. Therefore, this catalogue should not be regarded as comprehensive, since several other harbours or havens could have been active during these periods, even if harbour-works have not been identified or these places were not mentioned as “harbours” in contemporary textual sources.