Please Note:  We invite paper proposals for a session at the 2026 AIA/SCS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, January 7 – 10, 2026. Abstract submissions will close March 5th, 2025. The session organizers will review abstracts and send decisions to authors in mid-March. The session will only run if given final approval by the AIA and SCS. 

In line with AIA/SCS guidelines and in order to foster inclusivity within the proposed joint session, abstract selection will take into consideration participant diversity in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, and career stage.

Non-resident scholar travel funding

Joint AIA-SCS Colloquium Session organizers may nominate one presenter who resides outside the United States of America and Canada as an applicant for non-resident scholar travel funding. For more information: https://www.archaeological.org/programs/professionals/annual-meeting/call-for-papers/funding/ 

If you would like to be considered for non-resident scholar travel funding, you can indicate as such in the google form when you submit your abstract.

—————————

This joint AIA/SCS colloquium highlights new and transformative contributions to our understanding of the ancient maritime world at the intersection of Classics and Maritime Archaeology. The goal is to explore the realities of the human maritime landscape in conversation with the literary constructs of seafaring preserved in classical texts, highlighting potential shifts in our understanding of both literary and material evidence.  

Narratives about the social history of the ancient maritime world are dependent on both material culture and innovative approaches to ancient texts. Pindar (Olympian 1.1) claimed that ‘water is best’, Pliny (NH 7.57) admired sails and oars as among the greatest of all human inventions, and celebrated tales of shipwrecks, battles, and heroic odysseys abound; explorations of literary constructs illustrate the sea’s functional centrality in trade, politics, and war. Although the everyday rhythm of maritime communities and its attendant participants (in the case of women, slaves, foreigners, and sailors) have traditionally remained peripheral or even almost invisible, recent scholarship has aimed at remedying this lacuna, using archaeological and literary evidence to bring these figures into sharper focus. In this sense, this colloquium takes inspiration from ‘Liquid Poetics: Bodies of Water and Greek Poetry’ (SCS-67, 2025), which explored the contradictory nature of water and its destabilizing effect on conventional social hierarchies.

‘Peopling the Sea’ seeks to provide a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars from diverse subfields within Classics and Maritime Archaeology who are rarely afforded the opportunity to bring their research into conversation. Thus, we invite contributions from all scholars of the ancient maritime past: archaeologists, literary scholars, art historians, and historians whose work is engaged in enriching our view of the sea through the reconstruction of maritime life and communities that emphasize a less ‘landed’ view of the classical past. We particularly invite contributions from scholars working on cultural perceptions of the sea, including comparative or cross-cultural studies of maritime worlds in antiquity, ancient coastal lifeways, fishing, sea-travel, and other topics that have traditionally been treated peripheral to studies of naval warfare and seaborne economic interaction. Our aim is to spark a rich dialogue that situates the ancient maritime world within its broader social and ecological contexts.

In planning this colloquium, we are inspired by bodies of work that bring together diverse evidence for ancient maritime worlds. Examples of possible paper topics in this session include:

– The exploration of maritime labor including sailing, fishing and harbor work. The performance of labor at sea was central to the success of both ancient empires and smaller coastal communities, and thinking across scales allows us to see the contributions of individuals and communities to larger economic and social systems (Horden and Purcell 2000; Leidwanger 2020).

– The social embeddedness of these maritime systems (Broodbank 2013) by thinking about the knowledge, technologies and rituals that were attendant components of sea voyages (Brody 2008; Arnaud 2014; Gambin 2014).

– Expressions of attitudes and beliefs about the sea including the risks associated with shipwrecks (Seneca, Natural Questions), the development of bodies of maritime law  (Cicero, Verrine Orations; Candy 2025), the accounts of women who could save or sink a ship (Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia), and the broader influence of the sea on ancient thought (Kosmin 2024).

– While sailing, fishing, naval warfare and colonization are often treated as traditionally masculine activities, expansive theoretical approaches to the ancient evidence allow for new interpretations (Ransley 2006), opening up possibilities for the exploration of the maritime mobility of women (Streiffert Eikeland 2023) and other people traditionally left out of the human history of the sea (Kaiser and Moatti 2023).

– Taking Helen Farr’s (2006) invitation to see “seafaring as social action,” we are interested in archaeological interventions that deal with shipwreck assemblages (Harpster 2012; Munnery 2024), harbors (Watrous 2007), and coastal settlements and provide evidence for shifting networks of relationality that engaged human actors, materials and the natural environment. 

Please submit a title and an abstract of max. 650 words through the following link by Wednesday, 5 March 2025: https://forms.gle/BkT38UAzXE9FmPfC8

Abstract guidelines for Joint AIA/SCS Colloquiums can be found here, once the webpage has been updated for 2026: https://www.archaeological.org/programs/professionals/annual-meeting/

For further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

 

With best wishes,

 

Lana Radloff (l.radloff@utoronto.ca) 

Bridget Buxton (babuxton@uri.edu)

Nicole Constantine (nconsta@stanford.edu)

Aviva Pollack (aviva.s.pollack@gmail.com)

Sydney Koslica (sydneyekoslica@gmail.com)

Works Cited

Arnaud, P. (2014). Ancient mariners between experience and common sense geography. In K. Geus 

and M. Thiering (eds.), Features of Common Sense Geography: Implicit knowledge  

structures in ancient geographical Texts, Zurich; Berlin: LIT Verlag, 39-68.

Brody, A. J. (2008). The specialized religions of ancient Mediterranean seafarers. Religion Compass, 

2(4), 444-454.

Broodbank, C. (2013). The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the 

Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Candy, P. (2025). Ancient Maritime Loan Contracts. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 

Farr, H. (2006). Seafaring as social action. Journal of Maritime Archaeology, 1, 85-99.

Gambin, T. (2014). Maritime activity and the Divine: an overview of religious expression by 

Mediterranean seafarers, fishermen and travellers. In D.A. Agius, T. Gambin, and A. 

Trakadas (eds.), Ships, Saints and Sealore: Cultural Heritage and Ethnography of the 

Mediterranean and the Red Sea, Oxford: Archaeopress, 3-12.

Harpster, M. (2013). Shipwreck identity, methodology, and nautical archaeology. Journal of 

Archaeological Method and Theory, 20(4), 588-622.

Horden, P. and Purcell, N. (2000). The Corrupting Sea: a Study of Mediterranean History. Malden, 

MA: Blackwell Pub.

Kaiser, W. and Moatti, C. (2023). Human mobility in the pre-modern Mediterranean. In A. Miranda 

and A. Pérez-Caramés (eds.), Migration Patterns Across the Mediterranean, Cheltenham, 

UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 30-49.

Kosmin, P. J. (2024). The Ancient Shore. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Leidwanger, J. (2020). Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies. 

New York: Oxford University Press. 

Munnery, R. (2024). Shipshape and Roman fashion: Space at sea in Late Antiquity. In C. Machado,

1. Munnery, and R. Sweetman (eds.), Lived Spaces in Late Antiquity, Oxon; New York: 

Routledge, 80-95.

Ransley, J. (2005). Boats are for boys: queering maritime archaeology. World Archaeology, 37(4), 

621-629.

Streiffert Eikeland, K. (2023). Female Presence in Maritime Settings–Trade and Warfare. Journal of 

maritime archaeology, 18(2), 129-163.

Watrous, L.V. (2007). Harbours as Agents of Social Change in Ancient Crete. In P.P. Betancourt, M.C. 

Nelson, and H. Williams (eds.), Krinoi kai Limenes. Studies in Honor of Joseph and Maria 

Shaw. Prehistory Monographs 22, Philadelphia: INSTAP Academic Press, 101-106.