We are pleased to have launched a series of online tours to help with navigating Portus in space and time. Produced by myself, with input from the rest of the Portus Project team, the linked tours have been created for the Claudian, Trajanic, and Severan periods, and for the Fifth to Seventh Centuries. There is also a tour providing a virtual visit to the archaeological site as it is today. Finally there is an interactive timeline for the site explaining the history of archaeological investigation at Portus.

We hope that these are of use throughout the course and help you in understanding the different periods of Portus. The tours are intended only as a first step and we have many additions and modifications planned. We would welcome your comments and suggestions below or via portus@soton.ac.uk

The tours are available in English and Italian and are accessible via: http://www.portusproject.org/tour/

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On the Italian version of this blog I have now added a summary of the week three topics.

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On the Italian version of this post I have provide a brief summary of the activities for week two. Feel free to post any queries in Italian to me via twitter.

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Once again Eleonora has translated the summaries of the week one activities into Italian in order to support sharing of the course via Italian social media. As discussed previously the course itself runs in English and it is not possible to moderate the posts on the FL platform in English and Italian. This would require Italian speakers on the FutureLearn platform which is monitored 24 hours a day.

So, we will continue to provide additional resources such as this where possible, including the Italian transcripts mentioned in Eleonora’s previous post. As ever we welcome Italian contributions via other social media. Tweet Eleonora at @eleonorag1

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The discussion of the Navalia and the nails relates to the following sections on the course:

• Building Five – a possible Navalia
• [Advanced] Nails and other metal artefacts from Building Five
• Reconstructing Building Five
• Use of Building Five

Some examples of the “spheres” that Simon refers to are embedded below and also available on our Portus profile on Sphere. The first is a view inside the cistern – it looks black to begin with – turn around by clicking or dragging! You can also see the ceiling if you look up and compare that to the animation by Gareth Beale showing how the building was put together.

The second sphere relates to the Peer Review assignment for this week. As you look towards the cistern block you will recognise the mole from several of the photos in the Flickr album for the assignment, and in particular the photo of the coring in action. The trench has been backfilled but is just visible in the foreground of the sphere.

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First time i came to Portus in 2008 and spent two months learning various technologies used in archaeological (high tech) excavation. Since then I’ve been back there every year, and I am writing this post from the Casale, overlooking the Grandi Magazzini Di Settimio Severo.

My main reason to join the Southampton Archaeology MSc course in Archaeological Computing was to learn about the technologies to get the archaeology presented better to the wider public. And not only that – while in Portus I realised how different visualisation tools can enhance decision-making in fieldwork situations. The inspiration I got from that first Portus experience has encouraged me to learn more and also apply things I’ve learned in my home country, Estonia.

I’ve spent the last three years in Estonia, building up my connections with archaeological and cultural heritage community via the non profit company Archaeovision R&D. The company’s main focus is on cultural heritage documentation, especially different imaging techniques. I have had good support from people I’ve been working in Portus. Graeme Earl has visited Estonia three times, giving lectures about technology and the tools we use at Portus, and recently also highlighting the Portus MOOC. James Miles came over to talk about photogrammetry and laser scanning at the Rode Imaging Event, a four day mixture of lectures, classes, workshops and a hackathon that I co-organised in Estonian art museum.

With Marge Konsa from University of Tartu we have written an article in the Estonian archaeology magazine Tutulus about Portus and the visualisation methods we use here. She also helped to arrange for Graeme and myself to teach at the field school in Lihula, a tiny village in West Estonia. I was sharing my imaging skills, illustrated with examples from Portus, and Graeme showed some of the multidisciplinary imaging activities at Portus and elsewhere.

This season my work in Portus will include taking loads of photographs for photogrammetry and RTI and teaching students how to take photos for archaeological documentation. I will also be continuing to participate on the Archaeology of Portus course – if you haven’t registered there is still time!

It is exciting to get started, and to find more reasons to come back and include the connections and experience in my future work in Estonia!

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Human remains are also analysed using other scientific techniques such as carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis which uses the ratios of heavier and lighter atoms in bones as a way of exploring the diet of people at Portus, or analysis of oxygen and strontium isotopes in teeth which can identify the location an individual was living in childhood (when their teeth were forming). Ancient DNA can sometimes be extracted from human remains to identify genetic relationships, or genetic material surviving from past bacterial infection to identify diseases.

We have used similar techniques in the past to identify family groups in a Neolithic cemetery (c. 2600 BC) in eastern Germany where strontium isotopes also showed the adult females all grew up elsewhere (they were exogamous). They were from another community, perhaps 70km away, creating a kinship network between the two communities, a helpful strategy at times of hardship. Unfortunately, these families appear to have met a violent end as revealed by the pattern of injuries on their bones.

Haak, W., Brandt, G., de Jong, H., Meyer, C., Ganslmeier, R., Heyd, V., Hawkesworth, C., Pike, A.W.G., Meller, H. and Alt, K. (2008) Ancient DNA, strontium isotopes and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the later stone age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (47), 18226-18231. (doi:10.1073/pnas.0807592105).

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Portus was recently a case study in a conference held, appropriately enough, in the Markets of Trajan at Rome on museology across the world.

The intention of the organisers, the Fondazione Diá Cultura and the British School at Rome, was to discuss examples of ways in which museums – from tiny house museums like Sir John Soane’s Museum, to sprawling parks, like Hadrian’s’ Villa, can most effectively tell stories that will appeal to the broad and diverse public which is clearly interested in culture, and which is vital for the long term health of the cultural sector.

Portus was introduced by Renato Sebastiani, our partner in the superintendency of Rome.  His passionate advocacy of the potential of Portus as an archaeological park drew together many of the themes we had been discussing throughout the two days of the conference – the significance of the natural setting of Portus, with its unique planting and beauty; the potential of modern technology such as a Portus App. to permit visitors to be informed without noticeboards cluttering the site, and for information to be constantly refreshed; the way that the buildings can be presented both in their ruined form, as examples of conservation, and, again through technology, reconstructed; and the broader story of how Portus related to the city of Rome through the Tiber up to Testaccio and the Porticus Aemilia, both sites of huge interest but needing to be recuperated and better positioned in the city’s tourist trail.

As Sebastiani pointed out, Portus is not just an interesting archaeological site, it is part of the patrimony of the Mediterranean, a great trading hub which as participants in the Portus MOOC you have been studying.  It has a huge potential.  The British School at Rome , Britain’s leading humanities research institute abroad, has been involved in the Portus Project from its inception, and we shall be following the development of the Portus Archaeological park with great interest.

For more information on our activities, please visit our website, http://www.bsr.ac.uk/, and follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/British-School-at-Rome-the-BSR/373618910214

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Along with archaeology I am also interested in Web Science – the study of the World Wide Web – which has of course become our own sea of connections, and one that is rapidly changing our own world. Just a few years ago the only way most people could learn about a place like Portus was to go to the library or bookshop and hope they had a book about it. In particular I want to increase links between the many online resources that offer us information about Portus and any other place in the ancient world. Some of these resources are created by professional or academic archaeologists, classicists and historians, while others are produced by people – perhaps like you – who simply have a passion for the past and are keen to contribute.

The Pelagios project (pelagios is ancient Greek for ‘sea-like’), led by the University of Southampton, along with the Open University, the Austrian Institute for Technology, and with a growing list of more than 40 international partners, does just that. It uses a technological approach called Linked Open Data that allows us to hyperlink references to ancient places in maps, texts and images to many other such references. Much like Portus, it doesn’t replace the network, but facilitates its growth and the flow of information throughout it, allowing us to find out much more than we could on any individual webpage or simply by typing a query into Google.

Link to heatmap

The map at the link above shows one example of what we can do with all these links (it’s best to view it using an up-to-date browser like Chrome, Safari or Firefox). You can see straight away where much of the knowledge that we have about the ancient world comes from. If you zoom in closer you will begin to see much more detail, and if you click on one of the places in it you will get a pop-up Balloon that tells you about that place and gives you a link to resources about it. Try following the links and see what you can discover.

Pelagios is a continual and collaborative work-in-progress, so new content and new functionality is being added all the time. Our current goal is to introduce place references from all the extant maps and geographic descriptions from antiquity so that we can learn more about what the Romans and Greeks thought their world looked like (which may have been quite different from the way we picture it). You can follow our progress, find out more and leave your comments on the Pelagios blog. We hope to see you there!

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