‘Salvation from the Sea’: Amphorae and Trade in the Roman West

Abstract

‘Le salut, pour l'histoire économique de l'antiquité, ne peut venir que de la mer’—heady talk, but typical of its time. It may well be that the decade of the’ 70s will come to be seen as the high summer of amphorae studies and it is, perhaps, no accident that such great claims have been made in a report on a wreck at Port-Vendres which is closely dated by the stamps on a remarkable series of ingots and also has an exceptional series of painted inscriptions on the amphorae of the cargo. Few wrecks have produced information of such quality.