Affiliation: Stanford University
Justin Leidwanger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Stanford University, faculty in the Oceans Department at its Doerr School of Sustainability, and head of the Maritime Archaeology and Digital Heritage Lab at the Stanford Archaeology Center. Both in the field and back in the lab, his work focuses on Mediterranean mobilities, interaction, and maritime heritage. He has helped lead surveys and excavations most recently off the coasts of Turkey and Sicily, including the broad Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project, which included renewed investigations of the famous early 6th-century CE “church wreck.”
The “church wreck” off Sicily—with its 100-ton cargo of prefabricated columns and religious furnishings—has long stood as a symbol of Justinian’s revival of the Roman Empire in the 6th century CE. Recent excavations call this connection into question, providing a new look at economic, political, religious, and artistic networks and the merchant sailors who tied together the Mediterranean world even amid the fall of Rome’s ancient empire.
See Justin Leidwanger's work in the American Journal of Archaeology.
