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]]>On the Italian version of this blog Eleonora has now added a summary of the week three topics.
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]]>The post Week Three – Your Questions Answered appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.
]]>We have now uploaded the video addressing some of the questions raised about Week Three. As ever, we will continue to answer questions raised on the platform.
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]]>The post Sharing links appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.
]]>6.4 | Palazzo Imperiale II – Portus Project | (Link to Comment) |
6.17 | No title available | (Link to Comment) |
6.17 | Silex – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | (Link to Comment) |
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]]>The post Cross-referencing my thesis to the course appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.
]]>I provided a link to my PhD thesis early on in the course in Week One on the Find of the Week – amphora sherds from Leptis Magna step. In addition to this step I thought you might be interested to follow through from other steps to my thesis and vice versa. The “direct links” *should* take you to specific pages in the thesis, but the behaviour varies according to your device and setup. You can access the whole thesis in any case from the reference below.
I would welcome your comments on the FL platform or via this blog post.
(2012) African amphorae from Portus. University of Southampton, School of Humanities, Doctoral Thesis, 864pp.
WEEK 3 | ||
TOPIC | CHAPTER/PAGES | STEP |
Roman Empire in the later second century (first run of course) | (second run of course) | 3.2 | |
Emperor Septimius Severus and policies of the Severan emperors. | Chapter 1, pp5-6(Direct link to page 5) | |
Olive oil traded to Portus. On the importance of the link between Portus, Leptis Magna and Septimius Severus, and between Portus and other identified commercial North African partners. | Chapter 8, pp 308-354 (Chapter 8 is very important)(Direct link to page 308) | |
On the different Tripolitanian (Libyan) producers supplying Portus identified through fabric and petrological analysis of the amphorae from Portus | Chapter 6, pp244-248 (technical language is used)(Direct link to page 244) | |
Political cohesion | Chapter 2, pp34-35(Direct link to page 34) | |
WEEK 4 | ||
TOPIC | E-THESIS CHAPTER/PAGES | MOOC STEP |
Portus and the Roman world in the 3rd century AD (first run of course) | (second run of course) | 4.2 | |
Chronology and nature of the excavated contexts | Chapter 5, pages 141-155 (an important section)(Direct link to page 141) | |
Explosion of the commercial activity at Portus | Chapter 7, pages 292-295(Direct link to page 292) | |
On the 4th and 5th centuries AD at Portus | Chapter 7, pages 295-299(Direct link to page 295) |
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]]>The post [Advanced] Analyse some palaeo-environmental core data – comments appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.
]]>Thanks for all your interesting comments on my [Advanced] step. Lots of hypotheses have been proposed! You all described very well the core sequences. Congratulation! Different sedimentary behaviors can be observed: Claudius’ basin shows sand accretion, whereas the access channel to Trajan’s basin shows mud accumulation.
MAIN DATASET PROVIDED | Claudian basin | Trajanic basin |
Grain-size analysis=Hydrodynamism | Sandy | Muddy (silt and clay + organic matter) |
Water currents passing by the CL2 core location cannot transport coarse sediment (>2mm) and take away silts and clays (<63μm). Only the sandy sediment are deposited (63μ to 2mm)à Medium hydrodynamism | Currents passing by the TRXX core location cannot transport coarse and sandy sediments. Only fine sediment are transported and deposited.à Sheltered environment(possibility of flocculation in a mixed environment between fresh- and saltwater) | |
Bioindicators (shells, posidonia – seagrass)=Type of environments | Shells | Shells + posidonia |
(1) Identified shells are generally marine and sometimes from a brackish environment (data where not provided in the graphs)(2) Posidonia (seagrass) is absent probably because of currents that take them away. | (1) Identified shells are mostly from a brackish environment;(2) Posidonia fibers (sea grass) are not in context but transported from another place and settle in the sheltered environment of the Trajanic basin. Nevertheless, it shows an influence of marine currents. | |
Datings(Radiocarbon dating, ceramics)=Absolute chronology | -7 m = 145BC – 95AD-5 m = 270-520 AD | -6m = 50-250AD-4.50m = 160-405 AD-3m = 185-425 AD |
Radiocarbon datings provide us a large margin of error. However, these datings suggest that the harbour basins where maintained at an adequate depth to allow Ancient biggest ship to use these harbour basins until at least the 3rd c AD and most probably later. These 2 coring do not allow us to identify dredging phases. | ||
OTHER QUESTIONS | Claudian basin | Trajanic basin |
Harbour basins depth (bellow roman sea level of the 3rd -5th c AD recorded at Portus) | 7.50 m | 6.80 m |
The basins are very deep! For comparison, the biggest ships during Ancient times have a maximum draught of 4.50m. Question still in discussion amongst researchers: why excavating such a deep harbour basins? In order to reduce the frequency of dredging? | ||
Specific units | CL2 – Unit C = A muddy layer in a sandy harbour basin | TRXX – Unit D = A sandy layer in a muddy harbour basin |
– Deposited after the beginning of the work at Portus. During the excavation of the Claudian basin or just after?– Was the Claudius efficient as a sheltered basin at the beginning? | – Stronger currents penetrating in a sheltered environment. Two hypothesis: from the river? From the sea?– Complementary sedimentological and geochemical analysis suggest that it corresponds to river inputs | |
Origin of the sediments, transport and deposition | On a river delta, sediments come from the river (very coarse and very fine sediments). After the river mouth, fine sediment are transported in offshore. Coarse sediments are deposited near the River mouth. Sand are sorted, transported and deposited by the longshore drift (swells) along the coast. > Sand deposits of the Claudian harbour are transported, deposited and sorted by the swells. | On the coast, swells cannot transport very coarse sediment, and silts – clay are not deposited. The Trajanic basin is a quiet environment and traps the fine sediments coming from the Tiber river (mostly during floods). Slow currents lead to the decantation of small particles and cannot transport sands and coarser sediments into the Trajanic basin. Flocculation occurs as well. |
In italics = interpretations
I am proposing you to put into context these results. The main question concerning the harbour basins of Portus is: why Trajan decided to excavate a second basin?
Some hypotheses developed suggested that the Claudian harbour was prone to rapid silting. The results show that Trajan built the second hexagonal basin because Claudius’ harbour did not protect the ships from the wind and swell, and not because of a rapid silting. Tacitus (Annals, 15, 18) tells us about about a strom entering in 62 AD in the harbour basin of Claudius and sank c. 200 ships. This event suggests that the Claudian basin was not sheltered against strong storms and can be related to the result obtained by coring analysis.
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]]>The post Summary of week three in Italian appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.
]]>On the Italian version of this blog I have now added a summary of the week three topics.
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]]>The post Research data and MOOCosystems appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.
]]>I’ve spoken at a number of events recently about what I see as the potential for joining up MOOCs in order to create shared curricula. I have for example cross-referenced material in the Archaeology of Portus course to Coursera and Brown’s Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets course, and to the Coursera and Yale Roman Architecture course.
In the coming weeks we are going to be encouraging more reconstruction of Portus by learners, and wouldn’t it be amazing if some of the learners on the FutureLearn and Monash Creative Coding course (that started just now and looks fab) began making creative responses to our Portus material as the two courses ran? You’ll see in week five of our course how we use procedural modelling (related to the generative programming described on Creative Coding) to visualise alternative versions of the shipsheds at Portus.
Learners on our course have also cross-referenced to these and to other courses, including discussions of Shakespeare’s references to the Roman world and Roman Emperors in the FutureLearn and Warwick Shakespeare and his world course. This kind of cross-referencing is currently a little limited by the technology – whilst we can provide deep links to specific pages the authentication on the platforms means that mashing-up (to be very old fashioned) of the content is not easy. But it won’t be long. I can certainly envisage the markdown text that lies behind our course being curated into another hybrid course. Whilst I can imagine some resistance to this on the basis that we have all put a lot of effort into structuring coherent courses with a clear progression (of course the reason for the linear structure employed on many MOOC platforms) I can also see the potential in anyone else producing such a linear narrative but blending content from a variety of original courses. Similarly I can imagine courses growing organically, and interlinking in far more creative ways, as other OERs have been for many years.
One way I think such a MOOCosystem (insert sickened air quotes at will) could flourish is by shared or linked research data. An emphasis on open scholarship and in particular open publication and open research data is never far from the MOOC. In preparing our own course we had to consider the publication environment within which our research had been disseminated previously, and also the possibilities for innovation in the future. What excites me most about the next year is the chance for us to share much more of our research data from Portus and feed this back directly into the course. The Archaeology Data Service will be key to this as we deposit our final archive with them, and we have been in discussions for a while about how best to cross-reference our research data to conventional as well as on-line publications.
We just started week three and Kristian Strutt has created an [Advanced] step that allows learners to process a small sample of our geophysics data. By the time the course runs again we anticipate that learners could use this same approach to process, interpret, share their interpretations and comment on others’, but with access to all of the geophysics data from the project. In turn learners will be able to read more of the existing published material (we are working towards more open publication, using both green and gold models in the future and with respect to some of our previous publications), itself linked to the research data behind it. In the next iterations of the course one can envisage the data that are being shared deriving from other related research projects and associated with many courses, each with cohorts of learners enriching the data through their activities.
Of course none of this is revolutionary but as a first time MOOC-educator I am only now starting to realise the immense power of this interconnection of data, publications and open learning. And I still think, as I stated in My Archaeologist is an App, that such an interconnected learning system requires more able, research-led educators rather than less. Glueing all this together, tearing it apart through critique, and taking learners on a journey through heterogeneous resources will always be a challenging and creative task for which academics are well qualified. Putting data at the heart of these courses alongside open methods is going to turn everything upside down.
I really hope you enjoy week three.
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]]>The post Lead and the Roman water system appeared first on Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome.
]]>By measuring the isotopic composition of the lead in the sediments of the docks of the port of Imperial Rome (Portus) and the Tiber, a new study has shown that the piped water of ancient Rome contained up to 100 times more lead than the local water sources. Moreover, fluctuations in the isotopic signal of the lead in the sedimentary deposits studied indicate that they are closely linked to major historical events that affected Rome and its water distribution systems in late antiquity.
This research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers in Lyon involving the Laboratoire d’Environnement, Ville, Société (EVS, CNRS/Lyon2/Lyon3/UJM/INSA de Lyon/ENS de Lyon/ENTPE), the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon Terre, Planète, Environnement (ENS de Lyon /Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1/CNRS) and the Laboratoire Archéorient (CNRS/Université Lumière Lyon 2) of the Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée – Jean Pouilloux. This study was published in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in April 2014.
Research paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594.abstract
Guardian link: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/21/ancient-rome-tap-water-contaminated-lead-researchers
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