La investigación actual sobre la economía de los alimentos en el mundo romano queda reflejada en esta obra, que aborda la producción y distribución de tales bienes fundamentales desde el estudio de casos y la innovación metodológica. Consequently, this approach considers trade from a bird’s-eye view, focusing on the people involved in the transactions performed along the shores and understanding them as interacting activities between the privates, the imperial and provincial authorities. The analysis of the procedures performed in these sites, and in the places where the goods were found will help to understand not just the distribution but also the risks and charges assumed by the merchant and the shippers. Juridical archaeology focuses on archaeological sites where legal activities took place occurred (contracts, control by the authorities of the empire, trials, taxation), and it attempts to analyse and explain the causal links between the legal facts reconstructed through the material remains. I have labelled this method as “juridical archaeology”, and it proceeds beyond the legal text and begins to investigate explanations and causal connections between the reconstructed facts, the material remains and their outcome in the excavated site. This research intends to study the commercial activities taking place in these sites linked to both the infrastructures and materials associated. That model allows appreciating landscape as a place where procedures performed in trade, and the legal framework of them, were controlled and protected by the law of the Empire and other local legal systems being also applied (e.g. This communication aims to describe that model of the procedures taking place from a port of departure until a port of destination, considering the model described beforre. In that way, the use of the model of the cycle of procedures of ports helps us understand their peculiar features with the help of a common prism. However, we can gather something common to all them: the procedures taking place to sale, control, transport and store the cargoes setting sail and arriving there. Ports had contrasting structures, which were build according to their function, to the features of the land or the city to which these port was associated. This is to say that not just the enormous structures of the main Mediterranean ports such as Portus fit inside this model. mouth of a river, implying transhipping in some occasions). warehouses, docks), and its locations (e.g. This model has been created considering all the elements which can be present at any port (e.g. There were, therefore, geographical variations in the implementation of these procedures, but overall these activities happened throughout the Roman world. The activities described do not just depict the activity of the ports of the Mediterranean, since when considering other regions of the Roman world, a number of these distribution stages can be identified in the different sources, materials and port structures. Consequently, with the help of these inscriptions and other sources as legal or iconographic, I reconstructed a model of the procedures of distribution to understand the itinerary followed by merchandise setting sail from one port to other. These inscriptions, which reflect data such as product, merchant, or quantity, shape a record and provide essential information about the agreements of sale and transport by sea performed by the parties involved in trade. kilns, workshops) and until it arrived to a destination (e.g. amphorae, barrels, etc), which reflects the commercial cycle in which the artefact was involved since it was bought (e.g. My work inside the Portus Limen project is based on the study of the epigraphy of merchandise (e.g. Overall, one of the problems of the archaeological methods when studying sea trade is to mainly focus on the materials and not on the subjects interacting with them. In addition, even if different authors have used Roman legal texts as describing some features of commerce, they have not considered the legal framework surrounding the different procedures involved in trade. All these methods have their strengths and limitations, as for example, the systematic study of amphorae limits the understanding of commerce just for specific areas or products. Nowadays, roman sea trade has been studied considering different sources of evidence, such as pottery, and through diverse theoretical approaches such as New Institutional Economics or network analysis.
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