Welcome to Week One – the Port of Claudius

The course has just now become available! We have been working on this for a while now so it is good to be able to share the course with you properly. As you will now see the course is structured thematically, temporally and spatially. Each week we will discuss archaeological methods, object types, and also theoretical concerns. Each week we will focus on a new phase in the life of the port, and also work at a particular scale.

This week we will be studying the establishment of Portus by the Emperor Claudius. In terms of scale we will be thinking about the place of Portus in the wider Roman Empire. Our theme is connectivity, and we’ll think a bit about the Roman Empire as a global brand, and see how ceramics help to identify connections.

On our flickr “Studying Portus” pages you can see that the collections match with the course structure. So, I would keep the “The Port of Claudius and the Roman World” collection open when you are looking at the materials.

You can also start to contribute your own photographs via our “Portus” flickr group. Use your tags to help other learners to cross-reference topics. Here’s a list of the current tags in the pool.

We will provide supplementary resources for navigating the content via this blog too. So, for starters we have made a simple page that allows you to switch between the phase plans of the site by tapping on them.

Please include #UoSFLPortus in any tweets. See you on the platform!