Il progetto “Le rotte del marmo nel mondo antico” e la circolazione dei marmi bianchi nel Mediterraneo romano

We present the preliminary results of the study of the cargos with white marbles in the project “The routes of the marble in Antiquity”. Aim of this research is to reconstruct the traffics and the characteristics of the ships involved in this special transportation. We have surveyed four shipwrecks carrying Prokonnesian marble, and few elements of other white mar bles (Dokimeion, Pentelic and Lunense), and three sites with Lunense marble which allow to reconstruct the routes of these cargos in the central Mediterranean. The marble is always transported as raw blocks or raw columns also of very big size, but, in few cases, half worked objects (bases and thin slabs) can be present in the cargo. The size both of the cargos and of the marble elements suggest that often they had to be destined to the construction of big public buildings. The size of the ships can reach 40 m of lenght and 350 tonns of cargo which is close to the Late Republican onerariae transporting wine from central Italy to Gallia but much more of the other ships known belonging to the Imperial period. The chronology of the shipwrecks is III century AD for the cargos of Prokonnesian and I-II century AD for the cargos of Lunense, although these last contexts are still under investigation. The scarcity of pottery in the sites does not facilitate the dating and the reconstruction of the routes which is often difficul