In a project of this nature, in which the four participants all contributed their special skills while at the same time sharing the many collective tasks and interweaving their knowledge into the final publication, the only just way to acknowledge everyone’s contribution is to list the principal authors alphabetically on the title page.
Since this project has lasted for over a decade and has involved numerous countries and archaeological sites, we naturally have been helped by a great number of individuals, institutions, laboratories, and agencies. If we have inadvertently missed anyone here, we express our apologies.
Our greatest debt of gratitude is to the CTG Italcementi Group. We remain indebted to Dr. Luigi Cassar of Italcementi who supported our research in so many ways at its inception. Dr. Enrico Borgarello continued this enlightened patronage and provided a generous subvention towards the cost of publishing this book. We also thank Mr. Dario Belotti, Ms. Isabella Mazza, Mr. Piero Gandini, and Mr. Massimo Borsa for their invaluable assistance in surmounting numerous logistical and practical problems at every stage of our project. We especially thank Mr. Bruno Zanga for his very precise and nuanced mineralogical descriptions of the concretes. Dr. Gabriele Vola, Mr. Zanga, and Dr. Emanuele Gotti, the principal CTG Italcementi scientific staff who carried out analytical investigations of the concretes, appear in the book as contributors.
We could not have carried out our field work and laboratory analyses without generous funding from the following foundations, granting agencies, and institutions: The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Loeb Classical Library Foundation, Taggart Foundation, University of Victoria, and University of Colorado at Boulder. A generous last-minute grant from the Planet Ocean Exploration Foundation topped up the funds needed for the publication subvention for this book.
The staff and associated faculty at the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology provided enormous scholarly and practical advice, particularly Mr. Franck Goddio, Mr. Jonathan Cole, Dr. Damian Robinson, and Prof. Andrew Wilson.
At the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Paulo J. M. Monteiro, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Professor Hans-Rudolf Wenk at the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, and graduate students and colleagues, Ms. Sejung R. Chae, Dr. Abdul-Hamid Emwas, Dr. Penghui Li, Dr. Cagla Meral, Dr. Juhyuk Moon, Dr. Sean Mulcahy, and Dr. Rae Taylor, collaborated with M. D. Jackson in innovative investigations of the fine-scale compositions and material characteristics of the cementitious binding hydrates of the ancient sea-water concretes. Mr. T. Teague provided especially valuable laboratory support. Many of these experiments were conducted at the Advanced Light Source of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories. Professor Barry Scheetz, at Pennsylvania State University, also contributed to this research.
At the American Academy in Rome, Dr. Lester Little and Dr. Archer Martin generously facilitated our planning and permit applications in Italy.
At the University of Naples, Professor Vincenzo Morra, Professor Maurizio de’Gennaro, and Professor Piergiulio Cappelletti and their graduate students, Dr. Corrado Stanislao and Ms. Concetta Rispoli, collaborated with Dr. Gabriele Vola, to provide comprehensive mineralogical descriptions of the eastern Mediterranean harbour concretes. We are deeply appreciative of the thoughtful review that Professor Morra and Dr. Lorenzo Fedele gave Chapter 7, which greatly improved the presentation of the analytical results. The conclusions drawn from these analyses are solely our own.
Many individual scholars provided invaluable advice: Alessandra Benini, Dr. Fiona Brock, Mr. Enrico Felici, Prof. Elaine Gazda, Dr. Anna Marguerite McCann, and Robert Yorke. We thank Professor David Blackman for reading the entire manuscript so attentively and providing so many valuable suggestions, and Professor Floyd McCoy for his careful review and thoughtful comments regarding Chapter 7.
The coring at Santa Liberata and Cosa could not have taken place without the generous assistance of Dr. Pamela Gambogi, Direttore, Nucleo Operativo di Archeologia Subacquea, Soprintendenza Archeologica per la Toscana, and her team, Paolo Volpe and Archangelo Alessandiri. The Guardia di Finanza at Porto Santo Stefano generously provided a boat and crew: Paolo Gennaro, Sergio DiMauro, Pero Ronolo, Gianfranco Atzori, Imberto Martini, Enzo Timordidio.
For permits and assistance at Portus and Portus Traiani we thank Dr. Anna Gallina Zevi, Soprintendente, Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Ostia, Dr. Morelli, Direttore del Museo delle Navi di Ostia and her staff, Dr. Lidia Paroli, Dr. Anna Maria Reggiani, Soprintendente, Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Lazio. Dr. Cinzia Morelli, Soprintendenza Per I Beni Archeologici di Ostia and Dr. Antonia Arnoldus-Huyzendveld, helped C. J. Brandon survey the levels in the Claudian and Trajanic harbours
We received invaluable assistance at Anzio from Dr. Annalisa Zaratinni, Direttore, Nucleo Operativo di Archeologia Subaquea, Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Lazio. Our work at Baia was made possible by the kind assistance of Dr. Stefano De Caro, Dr. Paola Miniero, Dr. Maria Luisa Nava, Mr. Jonathan Cole, Dr. Dante Bartoli, and Mr. Derek Klapecki.
For our fieldwork at Caesarea, Prof. Michal Artzy, Director of the Recanati Centre for Underwater Archaeology at Haifa University, generously put the resources of her centre at our disposal and provided invaluable assistance with permits and other practical issues. We were ably assisted on site by Greg Votruba and John Tresman.
Dr. Rita Auriemma of the Università di Lecce graciously assisted with the excavation permit and with many practical aspects of our work at Egnatia.
During the construction of the reproduction pila at Brindisi we were given great assistance by the Lega Navale of Brindisi and its president, Ammiraglio R. Fadda. They provided the venue for the pila experiment and every possible courtesy and consideration while we disrupted the normal activities of the club. We thank Francesco Retta, Fabrizio Orlandino, Peppino Brescia, and Mario Colucci of Italcementi, Brindisi, who volunteered to work with us as their regular schedules permitted. We were assisted for the first core sample at Brindisi by Dante Bartoli, then a graduate student at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, and for the second core sample by Mr. Pietro Brescia and Mr. Antonio Vendeita of Italcementi, Brindisi.
For the fieldwork in the eastern harbour of Alexandria, Franck Goddio, of the Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) obtained permits and facilitated our work, supported by Bernard Camier, Jonathan Cole, and Zizi Louxor.
At Chersonesos, Tolis Vougioukas of the Dive Centre Creta Maris kindly supplied the diving tanks and helped with the hire of the boats from which we operated. The Director, Ms. Maria Bredaki, of the 23rd Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities in Heraklion very kindly agreed that her assistant, Eirini Karousou, should supervise our work when no other inspector was available.
Prof. R. Yagçi of Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir made possible our work at Pompeiopolis by facilitating our permit and our coring activities. Mr. Akin Kaymaz gave us invaluable advice and logistical support in the field. Prof. L. Vann, and Prof. Nicholas K. Rauh were also of great assistance in the planning and execution of the work.
In Istanbul, Dr Ismail Karamut and Metin Gökçay very kindly arranged access to the excavations at Yenikapı.
In the text of the book, dates are AD unless labelled BC. Place names in Latin or other foreign languages are not italicized.