American Academy in Rome - Fautores Abstract

THE ROMAN PORT AND FISHERY OF COSA

Anna Marguerite McCann

The Roman port and fishery of Cosa was mainly excavated in the late 1960s and 1970s by a collaborative team directed by this author. While the project was under the auspices of the American Academy in Rome, funding largely came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Missouri, the Atlantic Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and private donors.

Excavations both underwater and on land uncovered the remains of the earliest Roman harbor thus far known with its attached commercial fish farm. Dating from the time of the foundation of the colony and hill town above in 273 B.C., the port was surely the chief reason for the founding of the colony in Etruria and the source of its wealth in the last centuries of the Republic. The remains of massive concrete piers made with pozzolana mortar are the earliest remains known of this revolutionary building material invented by the Romans. Attached to the harbor in antiquity in the now silted over lagoon was a commercial fish farm served by a unique wooden water-lifting wheel, the earliest archaeological evidence for a saqiya mechanism still employed in parts of the Near East today. Masses of amphora finds in the harbor area of Dressel 1A and 1B, some with stamps and symbols of the famous Sestius family who had a villa in the area, document the height of the commercial activities of this entrepreneurial family in the late second and first centuries B.C. and the presence of their amphora factory at the port.

Recent underwater exploration in international waters off Skerki Bank in the deep sea between Sicily and Tunisia have provided further startling evidence for the importance of the port of Cosa for the western Mediterranean in the first half of the first century B.C. The main cargo of the largest of the five Roman wrecks found, Skerki D, was Dressel 1B amphoras. While clay analysis by D. Williams of the University of Southampton indicate that they were made in nearby Albinia, the ship must have been loaded at Cosa, the key port of the area. The amphoras and other pottery finds including a Black Glaze Campana ware plate dated 80-60 B.C. date the wreck in the second quarter of the first century B.C.

Today the ancient lagoon fishery is silted over and the extensive fish tanks and the Spring House that contained the water-lifting machinery covered over. But the remains of the ancient concrete piers, stone breakwater, Tagliata fish channels, the polygonal retaining walls, fish tanks and Spring House of the ancient fishing lagoon remain to remind us of the earliest days of bustling Roman trade in the last centuries of the Roman Republic.