Guest
Pirates, merchants, and navigators: Iron Age ships from the eastern Adriatic - Danijel Džino This lecture will explore the origins and development of three types of ancient ships which appear in the written sources connected with the protohistoric eastern Adriatic area: Liburnian liburnian, south Adriatic (‘Illyrian’) type of lemb and serilia made of laced planks. The relative abundance of written sources suggests that both ships played significant roles in ancient times, especially liburnian, which became the main type of light warship in early Roman imperial fleets and ultimately evolved into a generic name for warships in the Roman Imperial period and Late Antiquity. The lecture will provide an extensive overview of written, iconographic, and archaeological evidence on eastern Adriatic shipbuilding traditions before the Roman conquest of eastern Adriatic in the late first century BC/early first century AD questioning the existing scholarly assumption that lemb and liburnian have been closely related, or even that they represent two sub-types of the same ship. It will also look at other matters related to these ships such as the transfer of technology as well as their connection to the nautical environments of eastern Adriatic and the cultural and socio-economic context of their exploitation by people who inhabited it before the Roman conquest.
