Nicholas Bartos

Nicholas is an Assistant Professor (Adjunct) in Greek and Roman Material Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. He completed his PhD in Classics at Stanford University, having previously received an MPhil in Archaeology from the University of Oxford (St. John’s College) and a BA in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University. Nicholas’ research broadly focuses on the development of maritime economies and social communities across the Mediterranean and the western Indian Ocean during the Roman period.

Nicholas uses computational sailing models, port assemblages, and ancient texts such as the Periplus Maris Erythraei to trace the evolution of commercial relationships across the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Arabian Sea from the Roman annexation of Egypt (30 BCE) to the Arab Conquest (639 CE). As part of this research, he is a ceramicist at the Berenike Project on the Egyptian Red Sea and has studied material at several sites along the coast of western India. In the Mediterranean, he has worked in southeastern Sicily for the past ten years, first on the excavations of the Marzamemi 2 shipwreck and currently as field director for underwater survey at the ports of Vendicari, Marzamemi, and Portopalo di Capo Passero with the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project.