| Attempts over the past few decades to utilize shipwrecks to answer long-term economic questions tend either to build models from single excavated and well preserved vessels, or rely on numbers as a broad index of intensity of trade through time. Drawing on Roman and Late Roman (1st- to 7 th-century AD) case studies off southwest Turkey and Cyprus, I offer an alternative approach that situates shipwrecks and the depositions at anchorages and navigational hazards within a broader landscape of regional and interregional maritime activity. This landscape can be modeled through a GIS exploration of wind patterns, environmental features, and sailing technologies that affected the range and diversity of seaborne connectivity. Through this methodology, regional maritime networks become visible, and in turn shed light on structures and scales of exchange.;The maritime ventures preserved in the material record in this corner of the Mediterranean suggest several patterns. Small ships and short distances appear to have been the norm, with many merchants operating over a limited sailing range of a day or two. These connections fostered the development of maritime economic regions that allowed for dependable exchange among central and peripheral maritime communities. Larger, longer-distance merchants became more prevalent during late antiquity, when they primarily served to move goods between regions. The varying degrees of integration and fragmentation---within and across these maritime networks speak to patterns of regionalism in the Roman economy, which allow for a better understanding of how administrative and financial shifts, as well as the changing fortunes of the empire affected integration across the sea. These networks and regions provide a more variegated economic texture geographically, chronologically, and socially---and a dynamic alternative to the flat uniform blueness often portrayed in Mediterranean connectivity. |
