MedPONTOS (Mediterranean Port Networks: Technology, Organization, Society)

As focal points of seaborne connections, ports encapsulate the intersection of mobilities, technologies, and socioeconomic developments that shaped the ancient world. Network approaches offer theoretical and methodological tools for measuring, analyzing, and representing how these locations gathered links and structured past Mediterranean communities. MedPONTOS applies network thinking and formal modeling to the large-scale datasets of different ports—their geographies, features, logistics, and infrastructures—across the long arc of classical connectivity. Drawing together graduate student and faculty researchers at Stanford University and the University of São Paulo, the project interrogates how the multi-scalar connections of ports and their shifting individual and collective roles structured the rhythms of ancient Mediterranean life.