Financial and Logistical Support
The AHRC’s funding of the Portus Project and the Portus in the Roman Mediterranean projects to the tune of £1.6 million has helped leverage further funding from the British School at Rome and the British Academy, the University of Southampton (Faculty of Arts and Department of Archaeology), the European Research Council and the Loeb Foundation. Logistical support was provided by the Cooperativa Parsifal, Il Duca Ascanio Sforza Cesarini, John Ogden, L-P: Archaeology and Opti-cal.
The technological components of the Portus Project also stimulated further research and funding opportunities during the lifetime of the project. These have included work on innovative forms of digital imaging (Reflectance Transformation Imaging), methods for managing research data and linking it to publications (JISC IDMB), and novel approaches for bringing digital methods into the fieldwork environment (RCUK DE PATINA). Recent research to place Portus in its Mediterranean context through analysis of the finds from the excavations has been facilitated by drawing upon ceramic data in the AHRB-funded project Roman Amphorae: A Digital Resource. Four Southampton PhD projects have supported this work in areas as diverse as agent-based modelling and network analysis, geophysics, movement of ceramic artefacts, and the semantic web.