This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Trade routes and ports have shaped the history of human civilization, with the Mediterranean network among the most prominent and influential. Yet our understanding of its past is shaped largely by what remains visible on land rather than by the sea itself.
Stone-built structures such as docks, quays and breakwaters give us important clues, but they do not always reveal the full picture. To get a fresh perspective from under the sea, researchers launched SHIPs (2023–2028), a multiyear underwater archaeology project combining hands-on fieldwork across the Mediterranean and a major freshwater lake. By approaching harbors from the water rather than the shore, the project maps the different elements of a port system and examines how they worked together.
They discovered that anchoring areas beyond the formal stone walls played a decisive role in how much traffic a port could handle. Judging a port's capacity by its surviving stone docks alone overlooks the many ships accommodated beyond them. Ships anchored in sheltered natural bays, were beached along open coastlines or moored in deeper waters beyond the harbor walls.
These practices reshaped how researchers view harbor capacity in the ancient harbors of Caesarea, Terracina and Port-Vendres. The findings are published in Antiquity. Archaeologists have long struggled to compare ports fairly, since there's never been a standard way to measure trade capacity across such different environments.
Counting only the formal harbor basin badly underestimates how many ships a port could actually handle. The SHIPs project instead treats ports as complete working systems viewed from the sea, and the team built a standardized, four-part framework to study them properly. The first component was mooring techniques, which researchers approached in a new way by combining physical evidence with historical records to understand how ancient ships anchored and docked.
They examined surviving ropes, mooring rings and stone docking posts, then compared them with 19th-century photographs of sailing vessels. The photographs revealed how ships were physically arranged at dock and helped test the strength of ancient harbor structures. The second component was drafts and depths.
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