School of Humanities and Sciences

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  • Justin Leidwanger

    Justin Leidwanger

    Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Oceans

    BioJustin Leidwanger's work focuses on Mediterranean mobilities, interaction, and maritime heritage. Ships and ports, especially in southeast Sicily and southwest Turkey, are central to exploring these themes in the field, providing evidence for connections and the long-term dynamics that shaped communities amid the economically, socially, and politically changing worlds from the rise of Rome through late antiquity and beyond.

    Between 2013 and 2019, he led investigations of the 6th-century Marzamemi 2 “church wreck” (Sicily), which sank while carrying nearly 100 tons of marble architectural elements. Work continues through underwater survey, 3D analysis, and publication as well as immersive museum-based and pop-up exhibits and other initiatives. Project 'U Mari extends this collaborative and community-based field research across southeast Sicily, interrogating the heritage of diverse but co-dependent interactions with and across the sea that have long defined the central Mediterranean. These connections offer a resource for deeper critical engagement with the past, more meaningful identities in the present, and more sustainable development in the future. One facet of this work examines the socioeconomic dynamics spanning three millennia of tuna fishing through maritime landscape archaeology and documentation of the fading material culture and traditional knowledge of the mattanza. Another mobilizes archaeology to better understand the creation and circulation of plastics as maritime material assemblages, offering a window into socio-environmental systems. These efforts simultaneously foreground heritage activism through community-based archaeology of the spaces, materialities, and memories of contemporary journeys of forced and undocumented migration across these waters.

    Justin teaches courses and advises students on topics in Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique archaeology, Mediterranean heritage, economies and interaction, port networks, ceramic production and exchange, and Greco-Roman architecture and engineering. The Maritime Archaeology & Digital Heritage Lab (MEDLab) at the Archaeology Center serves as a fieldwork base and collaborative resource for digital modeling (structured light scanning, laser scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, network analysis) and pottery analysis (petrography, pXRF, computational morphological analysis).

    Author of Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (Oxford), and editor or co-editor of five more volumes, including Regional Economies in Action (Vienna) and Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge), he is currently working on two books. The first, entitled Fluid Technologies: Innovation on the Ancient Mediterranean, arises from research with students in the field, lab, and museum, analyzing transport amphoras, port infrastructure, and other clues to ancient technologies of distribution. The second, The Tuna Trap, explores the entanglement of mobilities that have and continue to bind the shores surrounding the Strait of Sicily.